Intel Cuts Atom Chips, Basically Giving Up On Smartphone and Tablet Market (pcworld.com) 170
Intel, the marquee PC chipmaker, has long struggled to get a foothold in the smartphone market. The company, which was late in joining the mobile platform, is still playing catchup with Qualcomm and MediaTek. And it appears it's finally giving up on this ambition. The company is "immediately canceling" Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, reports PCWorld, citing a company's spokesperson. The publication reports:Intel's mobile chip roadmap now has a giant hole after the cancellation of the chips. Intel's existing smartphone and tablet-only chips are aging and due for upgrades, and no major replacements are in sight. Sofia is already shipping, and Broxton was due to ship this year but had been delayed. Intel is also discontinuing its Atom X5 line of tablet chips code-named Cherry Trail, which is being replaced by Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake, aimed more at hybrids than pure tablets. Many PC makers are already choosing Intel's Skylake Core M processors over Cherry Trail for hybrids and PC-like tablets.The announcement comes days after its CEO outlined the company's future vision, and a week after the chipmaker let go 12,000 people.
Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:5, Interesting)
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My first impression is that this does not look like a good day for Microsoft. Is this back to Windows RT? That worked so well last time.
Well it war terms, D-day is cancelled as Intel won't be invading the mobile space. That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market. That said, WinTel's grip on the customer is certainly weakening. but the mobile/tablet apps are still often seen as second fiddle to the "real" apps. That might change though, maybe not today or tomorrow but in a year or five things could look very different.
Re:Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it will take over Desktop, but Server is quite a distinct possibility. Microsoft is in fact making Windows Server for ARM, and probably won't do the stupid shit they did with what was supposed to be Windows on ARM. If ARM servers can show dramatically reduced cost for energy and cooling, you bet your ass it will replace x86.
But that's not where Intel is going wrong. I think Intel is making a mistake in throwing their eggs into the IoT basket. In fact, a lot of tech companies are. I fully expect IoT to flop after a generation because nobody has solved or even attempted to solve the fundamental IT security problems it presents. The solution I hear from the talking heads when I've asked them is "well, after a device is EOL, you'll need to buy a new one to avoid future threats" which is really dumb. Nobody, anywhere, is going to replace shit when it still works and does what they need it to do. They'll only do that once when they realize the problems inherent in IoT, after which they'll just forgo it completely because it's more trouble than it's worth.
Besides, I still have yet to figure out exactly what kind of business problem IoT is intended to solve, and I really don't think consumers have enough money to buy on the scale that Intel needs.
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If given the choice. We already see with things like automobiles where most all models are online and I can imagine a future where most all appliances are connected though hopefully easily disabled.
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"Besides, I still have yet to figure out exactly what kind of business problem IoT is intended to solve, and I really don't think consumers have enough money to buy on the scale that Intel needs."
The problem of locking in customers to your proprietary version of something formerly universal. Duh!
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That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market.
Regarding the desktop market, what I really want, and what I think a lot of other people really want (but don't realize it yet), is the ability to attach their smartphone to an external (full size) display, keyboard, and mouse [1], and run "full screen" applications.
I think smartphones are already fast enough for this to work (if they aren't yet, they soon will be). Smartphones are already pushing tons of pixels (often far more pixels than your typical "full size" 1920x1080 display). A smartphone driving a
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Ubuntu convergence, Windows Continuum.
The tech is here, just not on Android and iOS that have the smartphone business sown-up.
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Ubuntu convergence, Windows Continuum.
The tech is here, just not on Android and iOS that have the smartphone business sown-up.
Perhaps what scares me the most is if Apple and Google fail in this area, Microsoft might win by default. Then Microsoft might end up with yet another monopoly...
Re: Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:2)
The majority of corporate desktops are Windows with many Win32 legacy apps. There is no way to run any of these on Android or iOS. An Atom phone running full Windows would be the ideal choice for this but no one seems to be interested in making one.
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The majority of corporate desktops are Windows with many Win32 legacy apps. There is no way to run any of these on Android or iOS. An Atom phone running full Windows would be the ideal choice for this but no one seems to be interested in making one.
A lot of them won't run On Win7 or WinX either... Hence a lot of companies with Virtual XP desktops for them, or old Windows Terminal Servers... And a smart phone does RDP just fine.
Re: Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:2)
That ignores all the bespoke software where the latest version is required, not to mention new features that people need or changed file formats on off the shelf stuff. That's not going to fly with too many organisations. It might be with a try running Win 7 with Bochs on Android but something tells me that isn't good enough yet, especially for people wanting more than one screen.
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That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market.
Regarding the desktop market, what I really want, and what I think a lot of other people really want (but don't realize it yet), is the ability to attach their smartphone to an external (full size) display, keyboard, and mouse [1], and run "full screen" applications.
I think smartphones are already fast enough for this to work (if they aren't yet, they soon will be). Smartphones are already pushing tons of pixels (often far more pixels than your typical "full size" 1920x1080 display). A smartphone driving a
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Well it war terms, D-day is cancelled as Intel won't be invading the mobile space. That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market.
But it is already! If you are either just shoveling bytes or doing all your work with the GPU, then some ARM cores can save you a substantial pile of money — both up front, and over time in power consumption savings. ARM servers are rapidly becoming a thing.
I got my pine 64, statistically nobody is going to replace their desktop with it any time soon, but they seem to have enough grunt to actually do the vast majority of what people are actually doing with their PC. I am getting a much faster uSDHC ca
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I would've thought there'd at least be a market for Surface Pro clones running low-power chips. Apparently not.
I guess SP is really just a high-priced 'status' laptop for executives, and will never invade the true mobile market. Still, even cheap convertible laptops might do well with a processor that gives them decent battery life in 'tablet' mode. If even that market is not worth pursuing, then forget the strategy of 'free' Windows 10 in order to seed the Windows app store. Windows will be a long-live
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There is a pretty decent UWP Arm/x86 app catalogue now.
Also there is still Core-M which is what effectively every Windows Tablet maker is using anyway. It does mean the death of the $100 Windows Tablet though for a while.
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There is a pretty decent UWP Arm/x86 app catalogue now.
Not really. I've yet to see anything in UWP that you can't do with a web browser, and consumers and businesses both seem to prefer that.
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Well, I mean that's a pretty high bar to achieve since these days nearly anything can be done in a browser. :D
But we've now got VLC (huge), Office, real Xbox Games, Instagram (only able to post through an app), Uber, Waze and Starbucks.
We won't start to see win32 apps showing up though for a couple months when the summer update adds win32 package support.
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But we've now got VLC (huge), Office, real Xbox Games, Instagram (only able to post through an app), Uber, Waze and Starbucks.
I'm looking through it now and I don't see instagram, starbucks, or waze (not that I use any of them.) Also the reviewers don't seem to care for uber or vlc on UWP, whereas they have solid ratings on iOS and Android.
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Facebook announced an Instagram app in the past day or two.
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LibreOffice? Photoshop? Matlab? VirtualDub? Illustrator? Draftsight? Comsol? Netfabb? Visual Studio? Handbrake? As soon as these and a few other apps can be run on a phone, I will be impressed. If the phone can also run at least 3 external independent 1080p screens then I will switch.
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You can already run most of that stuff on a phone, but it's a bit funky-chunky actually using it. If you have an Android device with a decent amount of RAM you can install a complete Linux environment inside of it, and run it in a chroot. Inside of it, you run the VNC X server, and then you use a VNC client to connect to that. I suppose you could use SPICE instead, but I haven't tried. You're going to need a really pissed-off phone with a crapload of RAM for it to run well, and some of that stuff obviously
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You are the "geek hobbyist niche" market. As am I. Sucks for us, as the mainstream has no use for any of that, and so it's only a matter of time before platforms designed for hard use are rare and expensive.
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Nobody was running those (except perhaps LibreOffice) on a low powered machine to begin with. For the 95% of users to browse the web, get email, open attachments and watch cat videos, a modern phone or tablet has plenty of horsepower. ...if the developer isn't lazy.
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Windows RT lost out mostly due to the spectacularly crappy Microsoft App Store, and they didn't push enough units out to justify developers investing in creating Windows Apps. Even with all the desktops using Windows 10 on PCs, their app store is pretty lame still.
If Microsoft can get some energy into Windows app development, they could put Windows 10 on any CPU.
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If Microsoft can get some energy into Windows app development, they could put Windows 10 on any CPU.
Windows 10 IoT runs pretty good on my RaspberryPI 2. I was pretty stunned Kodi performed better on that than it did under OpenElec (go figure).
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How do you get Kodi to run on Windows 10 IoT? I thought it doesn't include a graphics compositor? Furthermore, does Kodi even compile for Windows ARM?
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How do you get Kodi to run on Windows 10 IoT? I thought it doesn't include a graphics compositor? Furthermore, does Kodi even compile for Windows ARM?
Right, it only runs the headless version, for controlling content libraries, etc.
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My first impression is that this does not look like a good day for Microsoft. Is this back to Windows RT? That worked so well last time.
Nope - You just go knock on AMD's door.
Re:Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:5, Interesting)
Well there are some problems with that. Because Microsoft is in such a bad market position for mobile, they literally give it away, and sell their handsets at a loss. And with as much shit as MS fans give Android OEMs, the top 15 of them do make a profit off of their Android handsets, but as Huawei once said, "nobody made any money on windows phone", which has held true for every OEM so far, including Samsung, Nokia, and Microsoft themselves. Huawei is doing really well with Android, by the way; they're presently the #3 smartphone vendor by volume, only below Samsung at #1 and Apple at #2. The only OEM that might do anything is HP, but I really don't think their newly spun off consumer and business electronics division has any idea what the hell it's doing. Every mobile device they've created, every single one, has flopped, and even the area they were once doing well at, namely printers, has lost a fair bit of market share over the years.
No, Windows 10 Mobile is and always has been DOA.
I think the future of Microsoft isn't going to be in platforms for very long. They've made too many stupid mistakes to salvage that future. That doesn't mean they have no future, mind you, they still do really well in terms business logistics (i.e. Active Directory, which comes in the form of Windows Server sales, but even then, Windows Server doesn't run on bare metal anymore, it runs on the VMware hypervisor platform) and their Azure platform is doing well and will probably continue to do well, and in that role, Microsoft will still do very well for a long time to come.
Re: Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:2)
Windows Server doesn't run on bare metal? Are you sure about that?
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Windows Server doesn't run on bare metal? Are you sure about that?
Oh, it CAN, but no one does... I have even virtualized single server installations because it makes backups and snapshots easy.
Re: Think of the children! (Microsoft) (Score:2)
The reason why I asked is because I've got a Windows Server 2012 R2 box under my desk for my test VMs and it's running on bare metal. I wondered if this was some architectural thing I wasn't aware of.
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Here comes the ARM (Score:1)
Intel not Inside
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Not really. ARM really leaves a lot to be desired tool wise and the like. For embedded boards, Atom was a fucking godsend. Also for small low power servers there is nothing that even comes close to it.
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For embedded boards, Atom was a fucking godsend. Also for small low power servers there is nothing that even comes close to it.
This right here! I am going to miss the small, cheap, and fanless Mini-ITX boards I used for storage servers and firewalls, and I doubt I am alone.
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I thought the "fat binary" file format made it trivial to distribute programs that ran on multiple architectures (PPC/Intel). Check a box within Xcode and you're done? There's no Classic/Carbon legacy this time around.
The End is Near! (Score:1)
Time to stock up on prepper basics: food, water, ammo, and silicon.
IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
My prediction of Intel becoming IBM is coming true much faster than I expected.
Re:IBM [they are like...] (Score:2)
Oligopolies and monopolies typically lose their competitive edge once they reach the top of the hill.
They get fat, happy, and entrenched in their ways and cannot undo the bad habits until things are so bad that they have no other choice but to change. By that time the company is usually too deep to be saved.
It's kind of like somebody not changing their bad diet until they have a debilitating stroke. However, the equivalent of a stroke in Big Co-ville is bankruptcy.
Rinse, die, repeat.
IBM was very lucky to ha
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There was also a dot-com boom and this penguin guy to help them along in the 90's. I hope IBM had a "plan B" and I hope they adopt some stable and sane HR policies... I think that would go a long ways towards a "3rd chance"
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I think it's easier to have been IBM than it is to be Intel. IBM used to deliver the whole package, hardware & software & applications & consulting so they just loosened up a bit. Intel on the other hand doesn't have any other business than hardware that I know of. Really anything that doesn't comply with x86_64 or ARM is dead in the water. Show me the benchmars...
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Competition from within? (Score:1)
I got an Atom 330 back in 2009 and actually used it for about 5 years (until in 2014 I replaced it with an Athlon II from 2010). It was "good enough" once you got used to it, but obviously very low-end.
What became impressive later, was in 2013 when Haswell processors started getting into the same wattage ballpark, but needless to say, with way awesomer performance. And that's a couple generations ago: I bet Intel's own Skylake (not just ARM) is what really put the squeeze on Atom.
Maybe Intel is really gett
Re:Competition from within? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, saying Skylake and Apollo Lake are not aimed at the tablet market (I'm sorry, "pure tablet market") is kind of silly - and they were never in the phone market at all, for all practical purposes.
They trimmed a growing, obfuscated product line because there was redundancy, and worse, redundancy with inferior parts. Intel is going for the high-end of the market, focusing efforts on money makers, which also allows them to downsize staff
It's not a bad strategy, the only question is why they didn't to it sooner.
What if Intel is right? (Score:3)
Intel doesn't view tablets as a standalone market any longer, with form factors quickly merging.
Maybe Intel is right. The market for phones is saturated (Apple knows this) and low profit margin. Tablets are a passing fad. The future is somewhere else.
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I'm not sure tablets are a passing fad. It might be more that everybody who wants one, has one, and most of them still work fine. My 1st gen Nexus 7 still does everything it needs to do. Why should I buy another one?
Still, you're right, the future is somewhere else. Tablets are becoming a commodity.
I'm not a fan of Intel (Score:1)
I use AMD in my desktops as they're much cheaper for not much loss in performance.
I do have a Bay Trail tablet, and this news saddens me. It is the death of mobile x86. Sure x86 tablets did not have the battery life as ARM but it had one major advantage. The ability to use real desktop programs. In a closed source environment such as Windows, this was extremely important. Especially when your work involves software which requires desktop computing and does not come with source code. Likewise you never had t
Atom tablets will still be available (Score:2)
Bay Trail belong to the desktop line of Atom chips, that's right Atom tablets don't use a specific "tablet" version of Atom.
The reporting is weak, as is now usual.
What's really killed of is Atom for smartphones. Say good bye to Atom x3/x5 too at least. In other terms, everything that targeted Android is cancelled, what you won't be able to have is an Android x86 tablet, for which there is no market anyway. New 14nm desktop/laptop Atom will be launched in H2 2016 and tablets will simply have to use that.
In f
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Actually, there's a few Android x86 Bay Trail Atom Tablets. My wife has a 2in1 with such hardware. Identical to Win tablet from same manufacturer. They sell them at Walmart dirt cheap.
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I stand corrected then. Nothing too wrong with these, I suppose they have useful CPU grunt for web browsing.
True that you can slap Android on most any hardware and move inventory.
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It's actually pretty zippy. Android x86 runs really nicely on Bay Trail. Win8.1 on my Asus VivoTab 8 with similar Bay Trail hardware seems absolutely sluggish by comparison but is still very usable for the most part.
The newer Atoms support virtualization as well. I can run Android x86 in a VM on my Win tablet for a couple "gotta have it" Android apps like Worms Armageddon and a couple GPS Nav apps I like.
Yeah, there's a lot of ARM gear that's faster now but Bay Trail is faster than most of the low-end to
atom fanless mini-itx boxes are (were?) great.. (Score:5, Informative)
for some things, at least.
for audio, it was great. an x86 platform with a proper network interface, proper sata interface, expandable memory to reasonable mounts (for its application) and often there was onboard atx psu parts so you gave it a laptop 18v dc brick and that was your whole psu. totally silent, with an ssd.
otoh, the recent (last year or 2) of i3 has been so cool running, you can just use the fanless i3 variant on an itx board and have more fun.
still, the atom on the board was low cost, often fanless (more than the i3 was) and good enough for some video and any audio you could throw at it. it could be a nas server, as well.
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Core-M should serve this market well:
http://ark.intel.com/products/... [intel.com]
Several of the chips in the 2ghz range are passively cooled.
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Not at the price.
TRAY: $281.
The whole computer used to cost less than that.
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Apollo Lake, as mentioned in the summary, is still around. That's the codename for the desktop Atom architecture, which they brand as Pentium/Celeron just to confuse customers.
So, at this stage, it's only the SoC chips for a non-existent phone market they're cutting (which the Chinese tablet makers bought en masse).
Is it that difficult? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it that difficult to make a low-power 80x86 ISA chip to compete with ARM manufacturers? I know the legacy instruction decoding is always going to take space, but I thought at this point the transistor count compared to the rest of the chip was small. I figured Intel with their leading edge fabs would be able to pull it off.
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It isn't too "hard" to make a low-power 80x86 ISA chip with their process technology, it's just not easy for Intel to make a *low-price*, low-power chip, so it's hard for them justifying the "A" team R&D resources to do so. Thus Intel take their "B" team and resource constrain them to make a chip that is a derivative of all the IP they have in house, make some chips and wrap $1B around them with a bow and sell them into the market as a *low-price* (rather than low-cost) and hope to gain enough market s
Apparently (Score:3)
x86 requires more power than ARM which requires bigger batteries and produces more heat.
It's a fundamentally different architecture. ARM will never be able to compete with x86 in terms of computing power and x86 can't compete with ARM in terms of efficiency and low power.
You can never do more for the same cost of doing less.
Intel is making a good decision to just focus on what they're good at. If they want to compete in the mobile market they need to try to come up with a better ARM chip.
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check out their curie chip.
time will tell if its going to be anything important. right now, its an arduino-101 engine. it has its roots in x86 land, clearly (quark chip).
but the atoms were in a different league. I could feel ok running fast sata drives on intel NB chipsets and atom cpus. I would never think to put 'heavy' work on a quark ;)
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ARM will never be able to compete with x86 in terms of computing power and x86 can't compete with ARM in terms of efficiency and low power.
Be careful with words like "never", I remember very well when ARM was running circles around 80x86 in terms of computing power [wikipedia.org]: back in 1987, ARM's selling point was speed rather than low power.
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ARM will never be able to compete with x86 in terms of computing power and x86 can't compete with ARM in terms of efficiency and low power.
Be careful with words like "never", I remember very well when ARM was running circles around 80x86 in terms of computing power [wikipedia.org]: back in 1987, ARM's selling point was speed rather than low power.
AFAICT: The Wikipedia article you link to doesn't mention x86 processors at all...
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ARM will never be able to compete with x86 in terms of computing power and x86 can't compete with ARM in terms of efficiency and low power.
Be careful with words like "never", I remember very well when ARM was running circles around 80x86 in terms of computing power [wikipedia.org]: back in 1987, ARM's selling point was speed rather than low power.
AFAICT: The Wikipedia article you link to doesn't mention x86 processors at all...
I used to run a software PC Emulator on Archimedes [computinghistory.org.uk](1) in 1987, ARM (around 4 to 8 Mips (2)) was at that time emulating 8086 at the speed of an IBM PC/XT or AT (both below 1 Mips (3)).
While calculating a screen-sized Mandelbrot fractal at the time took minutes (up to half an hour) on IBM PC, the Archimedes did it in seconds.
(1) The 80186 co-processor card mentioned at the end of the linked article was unfortunately never released, the emulation was 100% in software.
(2) Acorn Archimedes speed [roylongbottom.org.uk]
(3) IBM [roylongbottom.org.uk]
Re:Is it that difficult? (Score:5, Informative)
When looking at the technical merits of Atom, it was actually quite competitive with the latest and greatest offerings from the ARM camp (with the exception of Apple's offerings, but Apple has advantages others don't).
In this case, the bullet to the head was, ironically, software compatibility. To this day, you can't just put an x86 chip in a phone/tablet and expect *everything* to work right that would've if running an ARM chip. Not to mention Intel charges way too damn much for those things and doesn't have anywhere close to a decent connectivity (WIFI/LTE/GSM) pairing solution.
Their SoC design was also shit. Codecs and DSP algorithms that others have baked in for generations are still missing from the latest and greatest Atom.
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That link shows nothing of the kind. It shows gimped Apple products not being able to keep up with another Apple product. The one gimped non-Apple product still performs better than the Apple tablet in the limited set of artificial benchmarks.
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Considering that the average iPads sold today is faster than the average laptop (i.e. Intel Core), the answer would appear to be yes.
http://wccftech.com/apple-a9xi... [wccftech.com]
bullshit, you need to learn to read. What the results show is the pro is on par with low end mobility specced tablets and other mac's.
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Is it that difficult to make a low-power 80x86 ISA chip to compete with ARM manufacturers?
actually, Atom was sufficiently low-power to compete with ARM phones. the real problem is they were many times more expensive and took more power.
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Skylake is down to 10W... that's the direction I'd develop. Atom sucked, no loss there.
Re:Is it that difficult? (Score:5, Informative)
Intel hasn't made an 80x86 chip in a couple decades. [wikipedia.org]
80586 / i586 was named "Pentium" because Intel could not trademark a number [wikipedia.org] but still wanted to distinguish itself from AMD Am86 and Cyrix Cx486.
"80x86" has since then become a de facto generic name for all descendants of the 8086, including the x86-64 / AMD64 / EM64T / Intel64 / x64 architecture.
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"80x86" has since then become a de facto generic name for all descendants of the 8086, including the x86-64 / AMD64 / EM64T / Intel64 / x64 architecture.
Agreed except for everything after the comma. Those are not 80x86 platforms.
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Apparently a 486 derivative supporting the Pentium's instruction set, complete with a PCI Express bus and DDR3 memory, and supports the XD Bit but not much else.
Though technically it's not a 80x86 processor, in the sense it's named the Quark X1000.
A return to the Wild West? (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 10 Mobile? (Score:2)
I wonder what this means for Windows 10 Mobile.
The tiny but dedicated fanbase kept insisting that an x86-based "Surface Phone" was on the way "any time now", and was going to be the platform's saviour. But now there's no Atom, and I doubt a Core M is going to fit in there anytime soon.
Mobile Atom was a dead-end anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel was caught napping by the mobile revolution, and they were late to the party. Thanks to iPhone and Android devices, ARM is the standard for mobile.
Now, that by itself doesn't force out Intel. But ARM is very inexpensive, and available from multiple vendors. Intel's business model is to make chips that you need, that you can only get from Intel, and then charge a very profitable margin on those chips. Intel does not want to compete on price in a commodity market; that's not what they do.
So now Intel was trying to carve out a share of the mobile chip market, and it was competing against a chip design that is available from roughly six different companies. Their desired end game would be for the mobile companies to buy Intel chips, get locked in so they depended on Intel chips, and pay a profitable margin to Intel for those chips. But none of the mobile manufacturers wanted that... why would they? Why not just keep using ARM, which is getting more and more powerful anyway?
Intel basically had to pay companies to use the Atom. A few took Intel up on it, but those devices did not shake up the market at all. Basically a mobile device with an Atom was about as good as a mobile device with an ARM chip.
The only way this could possibly have worked would have been for Atom to be better than ARM, and not just a little better; it had to be so much better that it was a clear slam-dunk win, such an amazing chip that it would be worth the risk of entering into an entangling agreement with Intel (and being on the hook for Intel raising the prices on the chips). I see no evidence that Atom was really better at all than the ARM chips, let alone that much better.
So Intel is now going to stop paying companies to build with Atom, and is giving up on that whole market.
P.S. I would love a small form-factor PC running a 64-bit ARM chip with completely passive cooling and running Linux. I'd buy that. I might even buy it if it was called a "ChromeBox" and came with Chrome OS pre-installed, but it would be an easier sell if I could get drivers for plain Linux for all the hardware.
x86 looks pretty safe on the desktop for now, but give it a few years and we'll see if that's still true.
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The big selling point for Atom is that it's almost as efficient as ARM but it runs REAL WINDOWS with all those x86 programs we love. What killed the market for Atom is that people aren't that eager to have Windows on portable devices.
You know, people have been trying to get Windows on portable devices since time was time, and paying a pretty penny for the privilege as well. The problem is that Windows has always been crap on portable devices, and now there are finally credible alternatives.
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Well, I l
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Re: Mobile Atom was a dead-end anyway (Score:2)
Raspberry Pi 3 has 64-bit ARM and runs Debian.
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Re:Windows Tablets (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, Windows doesn't have very good tablet integration still, even with Windows 10
Ok... Ill bite. I gave my daughter an Asus T100Chi with an Atom CPU as an ultraportable for school (she has access to a regular deskop, and laptop as well.)
She spends literally oodles of time with it, in tablet mode.
... ever try to close those tiny close buttons for your non-metro programs?
She doesn't much use those when she's using it as a tablet. And the detachable bluetooth keyboard and trackpad are right there when she needs desktop features.
Secondly, battery life is complete shit.. 3 hours or less I got out of my Surface.
That's the main reason we went with the t100chi for a school portable she gets 10+ hrs easily on the battery doing basic web browsing and ms office etc.
Thirdly, you still have to run anti-virus, and all that other crap just like a desktop or laptop computer.
We use windows 10 built in A/V which is pretty lightweight. And her documents are sync'd to a cloud service. If it were to get infected, deleting the user profile or even an OS wipe would be a fairly minor inconvenience.
And lastly, you pretty much still need a keyboard with Windows.. which makes you think, why didn't I just buy a laptop instead?
It has one. Its there if she needs it. For chatting on skype (video) or watching various streaming services, she doesn't need it. I was surprised at how often she elected to use the onscreen keyboard in tablet mode vs using the bluetooth one.
If you want or need a tablet for the portability, you're still better off with an iPad or Android tablet.
If you want a tablet sure, get a tablet. This is for people who want an ultraportable laptop, that can also do double duty as a tablet.
The surface pro is going gangbusters at work. Our outbound sales teams and managers love it. Its smaller and lighter than the laptops they used to carry around. It runs our point-of-sale/retail software which is windows only. They can do presentations in powerpoint etc with it at client sites. Its connected to our domain; they can run reports, they can save them as PDF, or print them because the company network printers are all setup same as any other computer, they can send them as email attachments -- with none of the usual tablet weirdness about hiding the file system or making printing funky etc.
A tablet, by comparison is worthless. Even Windows RT tablets were worthless. There IS a lot of value to the surface series stuff. It seems to fill a real niche.
The surface pro series isn't going to be affected as they're already further upmarket than the atom. The surface (non-pro) and asus transformer books etc that are atom based... I'm guessing will move into the m3 stuff.
Its really the phone to 8" tablet market that might be screwed by intel's exit... but i don't think anybody but windows phone fans care.
It does raise some questions though; a lot of people think that maybe our computer will 'become' our phone... we'll just set out phone next to our desk and our dual monitors, and desktop keyboard light up and we use the phone as the processor. That "dream" seems a bit further away if intel isn't going to be there.
Maybe ARM will go there... but I wouldn't discount the amount of influence intel and windows have.
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Thirdly, you still have to run anti-virus, and all that other crap just like a desktop or laptop computer.
AV and Malware protection are desperately needed in the mobile space these days. Though it might not as be self evident since we blithely let apps suck up so much information anyways. Just imagine if software on a desktop tried to gather that much data and ship it off to shady developers and companies, it would be quickly derided as malware and removed.
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Atom now have Quicksync (in Braswell and later). What a future NAS may have is an Atom that uses hardware acceleration to transcode that video.
Also, before you had that weird requirement Atom was an upgrade over embedded ARM that was too slow just to push files over gigabit.
Be carefule of sccope of SoC name (Score:4, Informative)
As usual, people see the name of a specific flavor of an SoC and think that the entire line is being spoken about.
An SoC has a number of process cores of a given types and then a bunch of other units that are specific to the application. A different application may call for a different set of units which will have a different product name.
The older example of this when people mention the sale of StrongARM as if that were the entirety of ARM development, when in reality is was just a specific ARM-based part that today no one talks about. There are plenty of other ARM products being sold.
Today we have word-salad about some x86 SOC parts being discontinued/not discontinued. Cherry Trail is being discontinued... because it is old and crappy and its replacement is now ready. The replacement is "Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake"... except the "Pentium and Celeron" cores are actually Atom-based. Pentium and Celeron are currently just brand names that carry no technical detail about the core they are applied to.
Meh. (Score:2)
From what I recall of the Atom it wasn't good for anything. It wasn't low power enough for embedded applications, and not powerful enough for other applications. All, they were used for was cheap netbook type things.
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Not surprised really, Atom seems a bit redundant between Core M and Core i3. Interesting to see which one pfSense goes with.
Since pfSense is software (as well as M0n0wall, SmallWall and t1n1wall) that can run on an x86 CPU, they will "go with" whoever makes a sold and cheap fanless Mini-ITX board. This market used the be the Via Technologies, and seamlessly moved to Atom, and it will seamlessly move again.
Re:As an AMD fanboy.. let me say... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, they haven't lost them yet. 3 of my neighbors are Intel employees (some at Intel's flagship semiconductor plant) and one of them told me yesterday that they haven't yet decided who all they are going to let go, but the ones they do let go will get a pretty good severance. They set a benchmark goal of 10% of the workforce, and the specifics are still being sorted. Some they've immediately let go (business segments that they're closing completely) and in business segments that they want to downsize, they're notifying teams that their members can voluntarily get laid off or retire early (with full severance.) After that, if they don't get enough volunteers, they're going to do forced layoffs.
Re:As an AMD fanboy.. let me say... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's entirely possible to restructure without laying off. Restructuring and laying off would be orthogonal things is management was competent.
No, Intel is a pretty big company that is having to deal with a pretty big industry shift. No matter how you slice it, the reduced desktop sales IS a problem that Intel can't fix with the marketing BS it used to pull years back (and believe me, they tried that already.) When you're in Intel's position, you can't just hold on to your existing expenses and expect things to work out. This isn't a management problem, rather it's a changing business landscape that they need to adapt to. The people who lose their jobs over this are dealing with frictional unemployment, which invariably happens at some point.
It's not all bad though, and this is actually a good time to get laid off because the economy is still in a growth period. I myself just got laid off from a really big tech company (who happens to be an Intel partner, by the way) only two months ago, and I just got hired by another company (in the health care industry, but still doing tech work) for almost twice what I was getting paid before. With the severances that Intel is giving their employees, they shouldn't have any difficulty sustaining themselves while they find new work.
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you can't just hold on to your existing expenses and expect things to work out. This isn't a management problem
You seem to have missed GPPs entire point about "hiring like crazy". I've seen this too many times in my career, when companies refuse to admit times are bad and hire like crazy right up to the mass layoffs. Instead, let the workforce fall naturally through normal turnover and hire only in areas you want to focus on after the reorg, and encourage people in areas you need to reduce to transfer if they can.
But that would require thinking forward, having a plan, caring about your people, and so on: things ma
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Nope, a tablet like yours will use Apollo Lake.
What is dead in the water is chips for Android Atom tabets, which nobody asked for.