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.
Isaiah (Score:4, Funny)
The Ars Performance Judgement (Score:4, Informative)
AMD is supposed to feel threatened by that?
Re:The Ars Performance Judgement (Score:5, Insightful)
Via's line doesn't get much traction outside of the tinkerer circles, because they're still tied to clumsy legacy chipsets and the costs are ridiculous, considering their extremely limited performance. If Intel can release a slightly better processor for less money, that can be paired with an inexpensive chipset and tiny power supply, they could take a bite out of the microcontroller segment and ARM's small but tenacious market share.
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Re:The Ars Performance Judgement (Score:4, Informative)
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Ten billion ARM cpus deployed to date.
Intel is a minnow in this area.
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Not at all. Are you aware of how many embedded Intel chips there are? I am counting the older generation parts, of course. Aren't you also doing so with ARM?
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Not at all. Are you aware of how many embedded Intel chips there are? I am counting the older generation parts, of course. Aren't you also doing so with ARM?
Are you aware of how many embedded ARM chips there are?
Do you know how many mobile phones are sold every year? DSL modems? Cable modems? WiFi routers? MP3 players?
Are you aware that every PC with an Intel chip in it has 1 or more ARM chips in it? Every recent hard disk I've seen has at least 1 (or more) ARM cores driving it. Monitors have them. The
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Via (Score:2)
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They used to charge OVER $300 just for passive-cooled Mini-ITX boards with processors slower than 1GHz. That's not competitively priced with ANY other platform. Just as an example, the (now $60) C7 1.5GHz board you linked went for over $200 on introduction last year! And the worst part: the prices never went dow
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I'm all for conserving energy, and I abuse my Kill-A-Watt meter on a daily basis. What irritates me, and this also applies to health fads, is the use of pseudo-science in marketing. Gadgets are being branded as "low power" when they were never high power in the first place, and sold at a premium. Other things are remade into low power variants, sold at a premium but consume more power during fabrication than the
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He's clearly someone who has never been involved in running a datacentre and doesn't realize what part of the TCO is attributable to power consumption. In other words, like most anti-eco reactionaries, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about; he's just PO'd people question his conspicuous consumption.
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"...because you know, the team that goes out there and works the hardest, scores the most points, and shuts down the opposing team's offense puts themselves in the best position to win the game."
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You've heard of Intel's xScale [intel.com] line of ARM chips [wikipedia.org], haven't you?
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Small but massively profitable market share may be a better saying?
-nB
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Re:Isaiah (Score:5, Funny)
Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:5, Informative)
The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors. The chip itself is tiny at less than 25mm square, and, according to Santa Clara, has a TDP of 0.6W - 2.5W, as compared to a 35W TDP for a "typical" Core 2 Duo.
Sigh. They do this every year or two - Intel announces a new core that will get them into more handhelds. They're still an order of magnitude short. Typical "very low-power RISC processors" you see in a device such as a mobile phone or MP3/video player are more like 0.01W - 0.25W, or even less. They're way more efficient clock-for-clock (and MIP-for-MIP) than any x86 core Intel has ever churned out.
Unless they have a funny definition of hand-held device we don't normally use, of course.
Re:Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:5, Informative)
These chips aren't designed to go into cellphones, and Intel frankly says they are not going into cellphones. They are instead designed for MIDs that will predominantly run Linux.
That's funny, because according to the link, MIDs are a class of hand-held device invented by Intel. So I'm right - they have a different definition of hand-held to everyone else.
The next generation of Atom at 32nm will have the proper power envelope to run your cellphone BTW.
They will be 10 times more power efficient than their 45nm version? Extremely unlikely. Also consider that the real lower power processor market isn't standing still either - they're managing about a 25%-50% power efficiency improvement per year. Also consider that the current high-end low-power CPUs you find in mobiles are comparable in performance to the first-Gen Centrino chips.
The kind of "hand-held" devices Intel are talking about have big batteries and are held with two hands. 1 Watt is not a lower power device in this market. The real hand-held device chip market measures their power in milliwatts not watts. They idle at a single milliwatt and average a 20-50mW in use. Intel is still running orders of magnitude higher than that.
Re:Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:5, Informative)
ARM vs. Atom
There's much to like about the Intel Atom, writes Williston in EETimes. Yet, he suggests, the media and its readers may have been overwhelmed by the hype machine. Williston offers the following responses to typical arguments from the atomic power lobbyists, at times quoting analysts such as Forward Concepts's Will Strauss to back him up:
Atom will beat ARM because it can run Vista. -- No it can't, says Williston. Atom can run Windows CE and Linux, but ARM can do the same.
Only Atom offers a "real" Internet experience with Flash video, YouTube, etc. -- "Wrong," writes Williston, pointing to ARM Flash players from BSquare, and an ARM-based YouTube decoder from On2. He might also have noted that Nokia's ARM- and Linux-based Internet tablets use a Mozilla-based browser, with plugins for Flash, Windows Media files, and even Microsoft's Flash-like Silverlight technology.
Intel dominates every market it enters. Here, the writer refers the reader to the history books, especially two years ago when Intel sold its PXA line of embedded processors to Marvell after failing to dominate the market for ARM-based SoCs.
Atom will win because ARM is proprietary technology. Nope, he writes. ARM chips are available from a number of semiconductor vendors.
Intel will win on cost. Not likely, he writes. Using a 65nm process, the Cortex-A8 occupies less than 3mm x 3mm, he notes, while the Atom core probably takes up about 9mm x 9mm of Atom's 25mm x 25mm die size, despite its smaller 45nm process. "With such a huge area disadvantage, it's hard to see how Intel will win on cost," he writes.
Intel will win on power. Once again, not likely, he argues. Intel quotes a thermal design power (TDP) of 0.6W to 2W for Atom, he writes, but doesn't specify clock speeds. ARM offers only "typical" power measurements, making comparison difficult. But at best, he suggests, Intel matches ARM on power usage, while "in most scenarios, Atom burns more power."
Intel will win because it has the most advanced fabs. Perhaps, he writes, but who cares? "Consumers focus on cost, power and speed," he writes.
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While intel did sell its PXA line of ARM uP's, it still makes a fairly large range of ARM processors, most of which clock at fairly impressive speeds. (Faster than most of the competitors ARM uP's) Easy to check, just go to the Intel site.
Even ARM processors start requiring a fair bit of power when the clock rate gets high.
ARM IS proprietary. The fact that every semi vendor appears to have ARM in its l
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The kind of "hand-held" devices Intel are talking about have big batteries and are held with two hands. 1 Watt is not a lower power device in this market. The real hand-held device chip market measures their power in milliwatts not watts. They idle at a single milliwatt and average a 20-50mW in use. Intel is still running orders of magnitude higher than that.
Hmm, if you're saying they would like to be running at such low power, or are trying to get their chips running at lower power, which is what you seem to be implying, I don't think you're right. As the articles says Intel is making 100k 45nm processors per day, how many micro-watt ultra-mobile processords are made per day?
Intel can really be in any processing market they want, and if they're not it's probably because they don't think it's profitable enough.
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Hmm, if you're saying they would like to be running at such low power, or are trying to get their chips running at lower power, which is what you seem to be implying, I don't think you're right. As the articles says Intel is making 100k 45nm processors per day, how many micro-watt ultra-mobile processords are made per day?
These apparently mythical chips I'm talking about: a) exist today and b) are in every mobile phone in the world. They make Intel's 100k per day figure look small.
Intel can really be in
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The number 1 reason why x86 processors burn this much power is the incredibly dense feature set they implement, a feature set that was designed with servers/workstations/desktops in mind, not .01W cell phones.
First and foremost, they implement a variable-length CISC instruction set, which complicates nearly everything in the front end of the machine (branch prediction to instruction decode), and some stuff in the back end too. Add on multiple operating modes, multiple paging modes implemented in hardware,
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No it won't.
It won't be small enough, nor will it be integrated enough. Sure, Intel will move the GPU and Northbridge into the CPU, but that's still nowhere near as integrated as the ARM based competition.
Also it seems that people think that ARM will stay where they are now, and just happily let Intel slowly get to their power consumption over the next five years. What utter tosh. ARM have multi-core Cortex cor
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Typical "very low-power RISC processors" you see in a device such as a mobile phone or MP3/video player are more like 0.01W - 0.25W, or even less. They're way more efficient clock-for-clock (and MIP-for-MIP) than any x86 core Intel has ever churned out.
I was under the impression that most of these had extremely lousy performance, and relied on dedicated decoding chips specificly designed for the task they do. Not that it's a bad thing, I've many appliances that do an excellent job but if Intel is trying to corner the "general-purpose PC in a handheld" market Atom is probably a strong contender. I'm not sure how large that market is though, the interface usually gets so cramped there's a limited number of applications that'd need it...
Re:Laughably high power consumption for handheld (Score:4, Informative)
I was under the impression that most of these had extremely lousy performance, and relied on dedicated decoding chips specificly designed for the task they do.
It's a common impression but it's wrong. For example, most of the CPUs you find powering MP3 players do decoding entirely in software. Even many CPUs powering hand-held video players do decoding entirely in software, but to be honest you'll find most of the high-end video players use hardware decode because a) it's faster and b) it's more power efficient.
The performance of the CPUs you find in a most high-end hand-held devices these days is surprisingly good. Well, it's surprising to people who haven't worked in the field, at least. We're constantly somewhat annoyed that the rest of the world hasn't worked it out yet. A high end ARM11 (common in high-end mobile phones) is actually quite competitive to the performance of a Via C3, for example.
AMD doesn't HAVE to compete in this market. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors.
I'm not sure that anyone really cares about what the instruction set for a handheld device is, since the operating systems for handheld devices has been relatively chip-agnostic.
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Yes, I have deployed compiled binaries on PIC controllers as small as the PIC10F202 [chipcatalog.com]. (24 bytes of read/write memory, 768 bytes of program memory)
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I'd really like to know where you're getting this.
IIRC Pocket PC runs on only three chipsets, Windows CE.Net on one, Symbian on three, and Palm OS on two (sort of...).
The only thing that I know of that comes close is Linux, and it's only mostly chipset agnostic because everything is written to run GCC, and GCC has been written to co
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If you're a developer it can be the difference between using well-tested, well-supported tools or some barely limping along vendor-provided tools.
That's true. Though I think the point is mostly moot. The low-power MIPS chips tools are quite mature, as they've been around for forever.
Intel (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Would this article read the same (AMD playing catch-up) if Intel didn't sponsor /. so much?
Benchmark much?
desktop CPUs 2007 [tomshardware.com]
mobile CPUs 2008 [tomshardware.com]
mobile CPUs 2007 [tomshardware.com]
AMD has been lagging in performance, power consumption, and cost for many months now.
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.
Humm do I hear an Eee PC? (Score:2)
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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.
They don't have much choice but to settle for it when the market doesn't provide them an option. However I think that's starting to change with Internet tablets and things like EEE PC
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 ou
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But they cost as much as an OLPC, what gives?
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But they cost as much as an OLPC, what gives?
I guess because someone didn't have the capacity to produce a zillion of these things.
It also looks like technology stolen from the 1980s. Who really wants a display that looks like it belongs on a calculator?
It's a neat idea though. It just seems it's over-priced, and under-performing.
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For $9-$12, they become disposable. People might buy a couple just to have around.
And there's no reason they can't fit extremely limited internet access in there, like, just pine or something, via modem or ethernet port. They
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In any event, I think these days you cannot appeal to the mass audience unless the device provides Internet access. Although for some people avoiding distraction from the
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Agreed. The ideal laptop stays up at full performance on battery power alone for as long as I can stay awake. It recharges in less time than it takes me to sleep. I would gladly deal with a double-thickness, double-weight laptop if meant significantly more battery life. Or even triple thickness, triple weight.
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I will take a much faster computer with more RAM and sacrifice a bit of battery power in order to do it. I'm not that often removed from power for more than three hours. On cross-country trips (I take a handfull a year) I have an inverter in the car. On an airplane? Except for international travel, recharge at the airport during layovers. I'll trade power for battery any day down to 2-3 hours.
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In fact for most applications one need not trade off speed. My PDAs and cell phones are not "faster computers with more RAM" but all of them launch applications faster than my desktop or laptop, switch instantly between apps, turn on and off instantly, all of this while never thrashing on the disk and lasting for days on the battery rather than 2-3 hours.
So my argument here is that, unless you are doing serious number crunching, CAD work, etc (which most people do at a desktop) most mea
25 square mm, not 25 mm square (Score:1)
which is a lot smaller than 25 mm square (25 mm on each side).
A nit, perhaps.
Re:25 square mm, not 25 mm square (Score:4, Interesting)
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And I have two engineering degrees, so there!
I don't think the units had as much to do with it as the ambiguity of area vs. dimensional size.
Since the original posting had said "measured 25 mm square" it wasn't clear whether it
was referring to it's area or actual dimensions. Go have a pint of ale on me.
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I'm from a place that properly uses SI units, untainted by imperial natures. I went to University and picked up an engineering degree. I have never, ever heard of 25 mm square necessarily meaning (25 mm)^2 instead of 25 mm^2. I would always assume the latter, and that's how my peers and professors talked to.
I'd say that under some circumstances it means different things:
"I was looking at the this new apartment, very lovely balcony which was about four meters square."
"I was looking at the this new apartment, very lovely balcony which was about four square meters."
The former I'd clearly interpret as being a square with each side being 4m (top floor?).
The latter I'd clearly interpret as being 4m^2 of ambigious shape.
I guess it'd depend on the context if I got it wrong, but if it makes sense to tell me the shape
subsidies anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of an economics lecture I attended once, which dealt with the topic of government subsidies. In general, the professor was extremely against subsidies, since they pervert free market dynamics and generally leads to lower overall efficiency, higher prices, etc. However, the one situation where he supported them was for industries where the cost of doing business is so high that the world market can only support a monopoly. In that case, he argued that subsidies were vital in that they enable the existence of two entities in a given space, thus creating competition and spurring innovation.
His main example was the commercial aviation industry, where the two big players are Boeing and Airbus. According to him, without large subsidies from the U.S. and E.U., one of those two would "win" and the other would cease to exist, leaving us with a single global manufacturer of commercial airplanes. I wonder if this argument now applies to Intel?
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Seriously, Intel is huge, but there have been other, better, chip makers before and likely will be again. If intel's competition declines, their designs will begin to stagnate as they try to increase profit and deliver 'shareholder value'. Then another AMD/ARM/IBM etc etc will come up with something different and th
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).
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Hmm, I'm not sure if it'd apply to Intel or not. Surely though it'd apply to operating systems since MS is a convicted monopolist. The solution is therefore for the government to subsidize linux.
The difference is that it takes billions of dollars just to start to compete with Intel. Someone could make a Windows clone and compete with Microsoft for, say, a couple tens of millions. That nobody does it is the stupidity of most of the industry, who don't understand the power of compatability. They just see
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The difference is that it takes billions of dollars just to start to compete with Intel.
Not quite. I talked to a former Intel chief engineer a couple of years ago who was thinking about starting up his own semiconductor firm. His business plan called for about $30m of funding, which he was offered but eventually declined because he eventually decided his target market would have shrunk a lot by the time he got a product to market (when I talked to him it was too soon to tell if he was correct). You might need billions of dollars to compete with Intel in terms of scale, but you can start ma
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The last 5% takes 95% of the time and effort
This pattern continues even after the software ships, unfinished of course like all large projects.
Therefore I doubt windows can be cloned
I have more hope for things like this atom chip to break the microsoft monopoly by creating classes of devices too cheap to be worth paying the microsoft tax on but powerful enough to create a new market and API ecosyste
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Someone could make a Windows clone and compete with Microsoft for, say, a couple tens of millions. That nobody does it is the stupidity of most of the industry, who don't understand the power of compatability.
Your idea has already been tried twice: both WABI and OS/2 were attempts to build a "better Windows than Windows". There are not many companies better poised to take a run at Microsoft than IBM and Sun in their heydays.
The plan most companies have now is smarter: build layers like Java, Flash, H
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Your idea has already been tried twice: both WABI and OS/2 were attempts to build a "better Windows than Windows". There are not many companies better poised to take a run at Microsoft than IBM and Sun in their heydays.
Au contraire, particularly for OS/2. IBM specifically declined to implement Win32, and also made the device drivers incompatible. That was the kiss of death. OS/2 was forever application and device driver starved. In fact, I recall IBM shipping their computers with both OS/2 and Windows 3
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
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If the OS is open source unix, it happened yesterday.
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I've gone through this at work, getting various OSS things written for x86 Linux to run on SPARC Solaris. Sometimes it is quite easy, just a recompile. Other times, it is a nightmare. I
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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 t
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Sure. It's virtually impossible for anybody besides those two to get in the game. This professor's point, though, was that if you took away the subsidies from both companies, one of them would necessarily fail, since the total amount of money to be spent on commercial airplanes worldwide is not enough to offset the development and production costs for *two* producers. Even if each claimed exactly half of the market, they would both end up losing money.
I'm sure government regulation plays a part in the c
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Yes, they DO run Linux (Score:1)
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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.
100,000 Chips / Day (Score:2)
- difficult for AMD to catch up
Do better on the benchmarks and it would be a smaller problem. People believe Intel is a performance winner, so AMD has to provide concrete evidence of equivalent or better performance. Easier said than done, but that's what can bring investment funding and sales.
AMD can go fabless (Score:5, Interesting)
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That may be true (although with the Athlon they were close), but you just do not get fabrication like Intel's on the open market. If you want cutting etch CPUs, you need cutting etch fabs, and that is not available as a commodity.
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(I am not an 'Intel backer' in the ludicrous Intel vs. AMD fanboy adventure, btw, just a bysta
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The AMD 29000 series was quite successful until AMD 1995 when AMD decided they needed the engineers working on it to concentrate on x86 (a shame, but it did seem to work out for them). That had a register window system like Sparc and the Intel 860 series (and the Berkeley RISC1 that they all descended from), but it used a variable-sized register window, which eliminates the register-wasting problem the other architectures had. To my mind, thi
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I've seen this line dropped a million times on Slashdot, and I have NEVER seen anyone back it up with proof. This is turning into the ultimate geek internet rumor, because everyone parrots it verbatim without checking the facts.
I say, put up a link, or shut the hell up. Unless you have a news article or a copy of AMD's contracts, you have proof of nothing.
The fact is, you don't even need a
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I mean, it seems strange to me that these fab size reductions keep coming down like clockwork if it's research that's holding them back. I would expect that the jumps would be more irregularly spaced and dramatic, even if they average out to the Moore observation.
"Atom" is a clever name (Score:2)
Intel has been running another clever commercial on TV news programs. A bunch of professionl hold the chip die (smaller than the chip case itself) and mention the remarkable contribution this tiny computer makes in some aspect of their life.
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.
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all day battery life
light-weight
instant on/off (like a PDA)
full-screen window manager (like a PDA)
de-bloated software
but with a full sized keyboard and display
The point for me is not a low-cost cheapie computer. The point is more utility, usability, portability when moving from the kitchen to the confer