[citation][nom]jimmysmitty[/nom]Thats what they did. They took the basic P54C arch and stripped it of a few things and put it on 32nm.Thats Atom.What they need is to push out 22nm Atoms ASAP. That would help power drain a lot.[/citation]
No offense, but you're clueless, and you're spreading misinformation. The Atom is NOTHING like a Pentium. Where do we start? For one, the Atom has over three times as many stages. It runs it's pipelines independently, whereas the Pentium pipelines were lock stepped, and the V pipeline couldn't even execute that many instructions at all. Since we're talking about instructions, the Pentium actually executed 386 instructions, instead of changing them into other instructions and executing them (called decoupled architecture). Pentium also had no support for any version of SSE, or x86-64.
In short, they were virtually completely different.
I don't think the P5 could be used successfully, however modified, because the days of actually executing x86 instructions are probably gone for good on CPUs. Larabee was going to use modified P5s though, but that was intended as a GPU.
I always thought the K6 would come back as a low power chip, and although I've heard rumors that the Bobcat is based on it, when you look closely, if it is, it's old very moderately. I guess it's just better to start from scratch.