Intel Atom Processor for Mobile Internet Devices and Low Cost Notebooks
Intel Corp. unveiled its first central processing units designed for Internet-oriented small form-factor mobile computers. The new Intel Atom processors are likely to show Intel a way into handheld devices, a market that has been relatively untapped by the world’s largest maker of chips.
“This is our smallest processor built with the world’s smallest transistors. This small wonder is a fundamental new shift in design, small yet powerful enough to enable a big Internet experience on these new devices. We believe it will unleash new innovation across the industry,” said Intel executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer Sean Maloney.
Intel Atom processors, which were previously code-named Diamondville and Silverthorne, are based on Intel Core 2 micro-architecture, but are tailored for mobile operation and manufacturing cost-efficiency: e.g., they do not feature large caches and do not sport certain peculiarities.
These new chips will be manufactured on Intel’s 45nm process technology and will contain about 47 million of transistors. The chips have a thermal design power (TDP) specification in 0.6-2.5W range and scale to 1.8GHz speeds depending on customer need. By comparison, today’ mainstream mobile Core 2 Duo processors have a TDP in the 35W range and run at speeds of about 3.30GHz.
Typical Atom based computers will be ultra-portable notebooks or tabled PCs with small 7-10 inch displays. Devices will ship with either hard disks or solid-state drives that use flash memory and offer battery life ranging from three to five hours. The majority of models are most likely to come equipped with wired network controller or WiFi, and then later with WiMAX. Some will be really sleek and thin, some will be a bit more ruggedized. The manufacturers will provide their solutions with Linux or Windows XP operating system and the Atom based devices will be primarily positioned for internet-surfing and typical office work. The cost of Atom notebooks will range from $250 to $300, which should appeal not only to small to midsize businesses with small IT staffs and more limited budgets, but also to emerging markets and consumers.
With personal computing increasingly going mobile and the computer industry rapidly developing new classes of products to connect the next billion people to the Internet, the Intel Atom processor offers customers the unique ability to innovate around the new low-power design. In addition to the mobile Internet device (MID) opportunity, Intel believes the demand for a new category of low-cost, Internet-centric mobile computing devices dubbed “netbooks” and basic Internet-centric desktop PCs dubbed “nettops”, will grow substantially over the next several years. The Intel Atom processor is perfectly suited to meet these new market segments.
By 2015 Intel expects to have CPUs with many smaller IA cores, each with very low power characteristics but with the entire chip being very high performance. Intel commissioned its Austin design team to work on one of the cores for this type of many-core CPU.
Anand Chandrasekher, Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group Senior Vice President presents the ATOM processor
Intel is effectively promising that in the coming years its Atom processor will enable you to, without sacrificing battery life, have significantly faster mobile devices and phones. We can’t help but be excited about that.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
[...] Cool device, but US$900 …. wow, that is too costly. I guess she quoted wrong price, as MIDs are supposed to be sub $500, if not even $300. [...]