Intel Ramps Up 45nm Chip Production, Announces 'Atom' Line 126
Multiple readers have written to tell us of the latest developments out of Intel. Earlier this week, Intel announced the Atom brand of low cost, low power consumption processors. The CPUs, measuring only 25 square millimeters, are the result of the Silverthorne and Diamondville projects. The announcement has caused this CNet columnist to question whether Intel can "spur innovation in ultrasmall devices the way it has in the PC and server industry." Concurrently, Intel has increased its production of 45nm processors to a rate of roughly 100,000 chips per day. As TG Daily notes, the massive investments Intel has made into chip production will make it difficult for AMD to catch up.
Ultrasmall devices? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the utility for these new processors is reducing power consumption on devices that are the same size we normally expect.
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop? Considering this is the 25th anniversary of the Model 100, which sold 6 million units, has 20 hours battery life, lighter than most laptops today and was easier to use, instant-on, off, people should know we can do better.
-- John.
Re:Ultrasmall devices? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop?
Given that laptop sales are at an all-time high, I'd say the answer is "yes". Do people want more? Sure, but they're willing to settle for 3 hours.
Part of them problem is laptops are just an extension of desktops, and desktops are driven by more and more resource usage (and thus more power). I'm sure someone could come out with a laptop with a 12 hour battery life, but:
It'd run modern desktop software slowly.
It'd have a smaller storage space (20 gigs of flash ram?) (this isn't so bad really)
The screen wouldn't be quite as "nice" as the 3 hour laptop. The maker would likely have to compromise on the screen technology to reduce power consumption.
low-power devices like this exist, of course. They're just identified in a different class of device because of the above compromises.
Re:Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:25 square mm, not 25 mm square (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it does (Score:2, Interesting)
It isn't that other companies couldn't compete in the desktop market, it is that they don't chose to. While you are right that the barrier for entry in to chip fabbing is extremely high, it isn't something that only a couple players do. If AMD went under and Intel decided to raise prices, you might well see one of those other companies decide to start competing in the desktop market, as it'd be more worth their while.
It also may not matter so much as time goes on. We are getting more abstracted from the ISA on the processor all the time. Assembly coding is becoming increasingly rare for desktop software. Also the tools are making it much easier to go cross platform. For example look at the MS tools for 360/Windows development. It is quite easy to port from the 360 to Windows, despite the fact that the 360 is a PPC chip and Windows is x86. This gets even easier when you use a managed language (like Java or C#) and the runtime environment takes care of everything.
While it isn't going to happen tomorrow or anything, I could very well see in 10 years that there are multiple different architectures for desktop systems. Nobody cares about that because the OS handles all the details, your apps run on any of them. People simply buy on price and performance criteria.
Eee/Cloudbook/OLPC class sub-lappies... (Score:3, Interesting)
Gimme one of those, with a REAL Linux inside (Debian Lenny would be perfect, or Kubuntu) and I'd be sold.
Re:subsidies anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.overclockers.com/tips01276/ [overclockers.com]
what clause 6.2 appears to say is that if AMD gets taken over or goes bankrupt, Intel has the right to end AMD's right to use Intel's patents and copyrights after sixty days notice. This would seem to mean AMD couldn't make x86 processors anymore.
The direct findlaw doc link:
http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/agreements/amd/intel.license.2001.01.01.html [findlaw.com]
So the arms race isn't so cut-and-dry because x86 is so pervasive. Any competitor would likely find themselves in the same situation as AMD because Intel holds the licensing trump card. Imagine being the startup trying to negotiate a fair arrangement under those conditions (i.e. where they could be truly competitive with Intel down the road).
AMD can go fabless (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AMD can go fabless (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheap internet appliances for the whole world (Score:5, Interesting)
My purchase of an Eee PC got me to do up a presentation for the engineers at work,
"Poor Man's Computer: Cheap Internet Appliances for the Whole World"
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc [cuug.ab.ca]
on the topic. Short version: as predicted by Dan & Jerry Hutcheson in Scientific American about 1997, the market is turning from "endlessly bigger and faster at the same price point" to "smaller and way cheaper if not as fast". We're taking our "Moore's Law gains" in the form of money rather than than speed, thanks very much.
And this price drop into $300 and $200 laptops (and under in the case of the XO) is colliding with the surge in global population that make $10/day or more in the developing world. Sales in the billions beckon. 100,000 per day? Hah. If they make the right product, they'll have to ramp up to many hundreds of millions per year.
Re:I don't think it does (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right that languages like Java and Python are much easier to port than C, but porting is the developer's problem, not the user's. When the software is open source, it is highly likely that, for major applications, some developer has already ported it to whatever architecture you may be interested in using. Debian runs on 11 architectures. When I used gentoo (perhaps not the best example of user-friendliness though) on a PPC, there was no difference using the open source packages compared to x86. It was the same case when I used Debian -- a little more friendly -- on a couple of sparcs. Now you can download Ubuntu for x86, amd64 and SPARC (and previously PPC), and I don't think you'll find anything much friendlier than that.
I don't think there's any question that higher level runtimes make porting easier, but to say that, for the past ten or more years, it hasn't been possible and easy for a user to drop Debian or BSD on whatever hardware he would care to use is just wrong
I was under the impression that you could compile sparc apps to run in 32bit mode and that this was commonplace for performance reasons due to shorter pointer lengths.