Why Intel really hates the Atom

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By Paul Hales: Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 3:02 PM



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," she 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.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/in ... 16/intel-hates-atom

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