- Saturday, 28 November 2009
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This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read - Winston Churchill
Why Intel really hates the Atom
IT'S DIFFICULT to escape the feeling that Intel would rather not be making its Atom chip at all.
For decades the chip maker has been intent on churning out faster, more powerful chips. As soon as a new one tips up, the older ones are canned and the firm harangues us with bing-bing-boing adverts – or it bungs cash at its army of sales outfits to harangue us – persuading us to upgrade with the promise of more performance. Once we upgrade both chip and software we usually find we've stood still, as operating system manufacturers <cough!> invariably eat up all that extra performance before we can get our sweaty mitts on it.
Then along comes the OLPC. It seems Intel had a look at this idea of a small, low-power internet device and thought, "Hmm, there could be something in this, we'd better do something about it."
It fiddled and faffed and finally shafted the charity project altogether, figuring there was money to be made, so it'd better corner the market itself. Low and behold, a few months later up tipped the Atom.
Of Atom, said CEO Otellini yesterday, "You're dealing with something that most of us wouldn't use."
Eh?
He compared it to a Centrino, saying the Atom only had a third of the performance of the chipmaker's favoured mobile platform. Atom is principally designed for Web access, he said. You can't even edit photos with it.
Now, can you imagine Otellini sitting in his office cutting up his holiday snaps and getting rid of his grandkids' red-eye before forwarding them on to Andy Grove with a note saying, “See. And you said I'd never amount to anything?” I can't.
I can imagine him opening his emails, chuckling at the latest in-house Hector-jibing circular, counting a few beans in Visicalc and wibbling on over to the INQ for a giggle and to get his blood boiling before running out and finding someone to fire. But he could do all these thing on an Eee, could he not?
This hack can vaguely remember being at the London launch of the Pentium III back in 1999, whereat then-CEO Craig Barrett (for I think it was he) showed off what you could do with the new-fangled chip. "Ooh... real-time 3D modelling," he trumpeted – or something like it. "Ooh... the Interweb in 3D," he cooed. And how excited we were.
Nine years on, I've still yet to do any real-time 3D modelling on my PC. In fact I'm still doing what I was doing back in 1990 on my hard disk-less 286-powered Sharp laptop – best thing about that was that it had a carry handle attached, most awkward thing was that Wordstar's spell check dictionary was on a separate floppy so I had to swap it out to correct my dodgy typing and swap it back to save it.
Anyhow, I bet you're not doing much more now than processing a few words, crunching a few numbers and fiddling about on the web, are you? And so is Otellini. Unless he's a gamer.
Intel's ambivalence towards Atom is down to the fact that it will eat into its more lucrative products like Centrino, or even dual- and quad-core desktop chippery. People might realise that all that power is superfluous.
Worse, software firms might tighten up on their coding. A nicely packaged Linux might emerge that does all the useful things Windows does but in 100k of memory. Shall we mention Vista? I'll admit it's running on the PC I'm ranting away on here. And there's a quad-core chip keeping it running too.
The best thing about a quad core chip? Three of the cores shut down most of the time so it's as quiet as a mouse. Vista? That Aero Glass thing Fudo was always banging on about? Not even noticed it. Couldn't tell you what it is. Don't care. I believe Charlie about the DRM business though. My music's downstairs on the XP machine.
If Intel bangs the Atom drum loud enough people might have a look round and stumble across Arm. "The internet's built on our achitecture, not Arm's", is all Intel can say about that. Like that makes a difference. There are a billion Arm-powered devices out there.
There may be a few hundred thousand Atoms. If you can get connected on all of them, who cares what's in the box?
While we're at it, it is also possible that Intel is having trouble churning out the Atom. Mobility man Anand Chandrasekher has already tried to pull the wool over our eyes over this.
Yesterday at its analysts conflab new chief bean-counter Stacy Smith referred to "supply constraints" the firm is suffering with the chip.
These are "specifically the back end, the test constraints," he said. "We have plenty of die. As demand's going up, kind of month-by-month, we're jumping to keep enough test capacity in place."
Hmm. Yep. I smell a big fat rat. µ
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Your base point that Intel would rather have a performance spiral to sell than a low-power, low-performance part is solid.

But any idiot that says something like, "Low and behold, a few months later up tipped the Atom" has demonstrated their total incompetence in interpreting corporate history and intentions. Intel can't do *anything* in a few months. It takes like 5 years for Intel to bring a program like Atom from "a good idea" to selling silicon.

Your populist idiotic interpretation of how the OLPC thing down is not any better. Please use a modicum of thought the next time you feel like ripping into a company. It will be a lot more entertaining.

I have to agree - the Atom is not where Intel wants to be.

I am actually looking at getting a EEEPC 901 or a MSI Wind - just because it is all I need in a mobile platform.

I am a power user - I 'crunch' engineering numbers, do highway design and terrain modeling - the more power the better for me. I run XP with the 'classic' interface because I can't stand the XP interface and can't even think of looking at or dealing with Vista. But I need the fastest desktop hardware I can get because I can't sit around for an hour while the computer cranks out the latest 3D terrain model or deals with the idiosicracies of Civil 3D.

For my mobile platform however, all I want is something light and simple - that will type a letter or e-mail, do some simple spreadsheets and cruise the internet. Oh - and maybe some programming in Delphi - compile times don't have to be speedy.

The laptop has to be small, light and most of all, cheap - in case I break or loose it. The Atom seems to be perfect for those applications. A 12Gb SSD XP version or a 20Gb SSD and I'll install XP on it myself.

I've an old 266Mhz AMD laptop w/ 4Gb hard drive. I've done a full highway design on that - while on vacation in 2003. (Don't remind me of "job dedication' crap - I'm 1/2 way through a divorce).

If the Atom powered EEE or Wind can match that old AMD powered brick - I've got the best of both worlds - and probably 60% of the worlds' population.

Just out of curiosity - Where does the Atom slot in in terms of performance in the CPU order of performance? Somewhere around an 800Mhz Pentium or so? One performance stat I have not tripped across.
Nice article. It's good to see some cynicism remains when talking about Intel and it's new, amazing and wonderful products....
I agree with this article. 

MS and Intel rely on consumer ignorance to make money. Everyone reading this article knew long before Atom that you don't need a quad-core machine w/ 4GB RAM and a $300 OS to check your gmail and post on facebook, and it's only a matter of time before the average joe sees this too. Screw 500x10^6+ transistor chips, and screw software bloat. Advances in manufacturing and software engineering should first be put towards reducing energy footprints of our devices, instead of tacking on superfluous functionality.
there is always a long line of asian manufactures willing to build the cheapest product - in this case a $149 atom powered pc. the scary part is that such a pc would be good enough for regular consumers.

if someone in the intel top echelon hadn't waken up and killed this thing, it'd destroy most of pc industry, intel, dammit, the semi industry, and eventually outfits like inq. so be grateful and stop whining.
ATOM will really struggle to out do ARM. ARM is implementable in, ooh, 32,000ish??? transistors (not counting surrounding peripherals), and I can't see ATOM implementing x86 in that many. So ATOM is probably inherently unable to match the power consumption of ARM. Therefore low power = ARM (still), Windows = something with guts e.g. Core2, etc. etc. Who want's something (i.e. ATOM) that's not the best at either?
a cheap cpu for the masses, and I mean whole world population.

It's flipping genius. Why sell to 1 in 10 when you can sell to 1 in 3?

The atom is the start of the big bang (ho ho). Intel are reaching for the stars. The sun will shine out of his ass on this one.

I reckon Intel shares will be up 10% by this time next year, if they can get the atom's price and production right. That's probably why he is raining on this chip, he's got to wait a few months before he's allowed to buy shares ;-)
Perhaps we should, in fact, be grateful for intel's somewhat delayed entrance into this market. Competition is always healthy (and necessary). Their market share numbers have always seemed a little too high.
As an Intel employee I get tired of people pulling blarney out of their nether regions and shoving it accross as fact, not opinion. 
Intel has been working on Atom for quite a while (not at liberty as it were) but a long time before OLPC. I don't know if The Classmate PC was originally where atom was meant to go; I do know that we were talkig about Classmate 2 years before I ever heard of OLPC. 
The manufaturing problem as stated is with testing and supporting chipsets. We are experiencing something like six times the demand out of the gate than we anticipated and the chipset folks can't keep up. But we need to compete t the bottom end to grow the business and if we just let Arm and Via have free reign they will soon work upwards to our performance space. So atom isn't where we want to be, it is where we need to be.
I don't know why Intel the effort behind Atom. It performs like a higher clocked Pentium MMX. Not much on power efficiency. 4W is too way much for iPhone. No one would put 4GB+ RAM on the device, so x86-64 support is overkill.

The Core Solo ULV can already do 5.5W. I thought this kid with less cache, and slash FSB width from 64-bit to 32-bit would do about the same on power. Performance should be better than Atom.
I don't think Intel really wants to compete in the low power, low performance market. I think they know that high-end chips can't dissipate more than about 130W and future high-end chips will have 64 cores or more. That means Intel is going to need to know how to make a core that dissipates 2W or so.

Enter, the Atom.
its that little thing called competition. You know - the thing they tell you in O'level economics is the driving force of a healthy economy.
The Atom was brought out as an attempt to destroy emergent competition, and as its was 'underpriced' to do so is probably leading to a huge loss for Intel.
Competition is for bleeding heart liberals and has no place in modern markets and will be avoided at ALL costs.
Damn that EU commission!

"If you can get connected on all of them, who cares what's in the box?"
This is what intel is worried about, what if we dont want an cumbersom x86 box, if we can get a cheap device that can connect us to the net with a big enough screen and long enough battery power who cares whats inside if its a intel quad core superduper processor or a simple Via or Texas Instrument ARM version inside. Intel have released that there 80% margains on the core2 etc chips are about to be cut very short. Thats why they hate Atom and why they want it just to be good enough for now and not cheaper nor too widely available. I would think Microsoft is worried too. There is no way they can charge the price they are charging for vista for these devices because it would be higher then the price of the equipment. 

The profits will swing back towards the main manifacturers like HP, Acer, Dell, who have had there margins cut time and time again but Intel has still been able to keep there prices high due to the lac of compitition and the ease they could push the buyers to convince them to buy there product instead of anyone elses. This is changing and Intel is affraid and should be. There stock will not rise it will dive long term. Intels profits of $6-7 billion a year is going to be more like $60-70 Millions instead finally we will have a choise!
To me tukwila is saying intel can do 1024 atoms or any equivelant processor config(without changing chips) on a single fanless mobo.


O.K. Paul O. probably doesn't do his own image editing, and maybe could get by with an Atom powered box, but is that what this is really about?

I went to the zoo with my kids last week. What impressed me more than the animals was the number of people with Digital SLRs. Really, how many of these people NEED a thousand dollar camera to take a few shots of the polar bear exhibit. 

Paul O. makes a lot of money and probably has a few high end PCs in his house so his kids can game. I also make a few dollars and don't need any PC (I'm writing this from work), but I still blew way too much on a dual core that I barely use (and my kids are still to young for anything more than Barbie.com). 

The guy who, because of where he was born, makes a lot less than I do probably doesn't even need an Atom, but Intel seems to be betting that he wants one. And if it can add something to his life why shouldn't Intel make a few dollars off it? Intel needs to be in that space to continue making money.

Finally, about driving out competition. Did you see Intel's gross margin over the past few years? They aren't selling anything below cost. They are just cleverly figuring out how to make somebody pay $200 for a Core 2 Quad that costs maybe $40 to build, and that is probably $30 for a $10 Atom.
According to the spec sheets the Atoms are better than most of the comments are assuming. The figures of (say) 4.3 Watts are for the CPU and Chipset Combined, a Z520 claims just 2.0W. Intels figures are usually "typical" so they may get a bit hotter than that in real life but so do their older devices. 

On the flip side the data sheets target the combination at "embedded systems". I do not think intel really wanted these to be heavily adopted in the notebook arena - maybe the smallest UMPC and MIDs. They could cost intel money versus sales of the older hotter devices.
You're dealing with something that most devil-may-care billionaire playboys, or the "true" driven industrialists, or secret detectives, wouldn't use. I, on the other hand, am a big fat bat.
I found it curious to see Intel Atom and ARM in same article. I owned an Atom around 1981. Made by Acorn. It was going to cost around GBP 120 to upgrade it to 8KB so I bought a Spectrum. Did not Acorn register the Atom monicker. It could make plenty of dosh from suing Intel for using its trade mark
I've noticed at the end of the day all a user cares about in their laptop is the size of the screen...

While the atom as everything else covered for a user, having large and comfortable user I/O (keyboard, mouse, screen) is not one of the,

I don't see the main stream user using something smaller then the HP2510p laptop...