The Intel Atom has been both a revelation and a millstone for Intel. On the one hand it has largely been the driving force behind the early netbook phenomenon, on the other it drags Intel into a low performance sector where it would rather not be. So Intel has admitted it will raise its game.
A report by CNet says Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney (pictured here at his Intel Developer Forum speech-) is determined to fasttrack Atom development. “We’ll spin Atom more frequently,” he is quoted as telling IDF last week. “Do more like a tick-tock on Atom. Make it faster, faster, faster.”
By ‘tick tock’ Maloney refers to Intel’s process of moving existing architectures to a smaller manufacturing process (the ‘tick’) then using that same process to make new architecture (’tock’). It then repeats these steps over and over again. Intel CEO Paul Otellini listed five generations of tick-tock in his keynote speech at IDF.
The first evidence we will get of this accelerated pace comes with ‘Pinetrail’ – the codename given to its next-generation Atom, which will integrate the CPU and GPU on a single chip. There will be two variants: the 1.83-GHz Atom ‘N450′ and the 2-GHz ‘N470′ . Each will have a faster 667-MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) and reduced power consumption.
What about dual-core Atoms? “We don’t currently have plans to introduce dual-core Atom processors for Netbooks, but we will base our product road map on market needs,” CNet quotes an Intel spokesman as saying. It is interesting to note that analysts assumed that Broadcom desired a dual-core ARM to enter the smartbook market, when the utility of dual cores in sub-notebook designs is still open to interpretation.
So Atom is again on the move after a fairly lean spell, stuck at 1.6 GHz as part of a multi-chip solution. How much of Intel’s new sense of urgency has been driven by emergence of AMD netbooks, the VIA netnote, and ARM-based smartbooks? I’m sure Intel would say none, but we’d suspect otherwise…
Gordon
