Third Time's A ChARM? Intel To Manufacture ARM Chips After Atom Failures In Mobile Devices

[Lucian Armasu]

Intel announced that it will license the ARM architecture so it can start building ARM chips for customers--its third big try at becoming an important player in the mobile market.

Third Time's A ChARM? Intel To Manufacture ARM Chips After Atom Failures In Mobile Devices : Read more

 

[wifiburger]

seriously Atom CPU were and still are pure garbage, any ARM chips runs circle around it,
can't do anything on that stupid atom cpu

 

[rwinches]

To be correct, after the 1.6 Atom chips which I have in netbook, Intel designed a Pentium chip that sips power at around 7 watts max. Binning netted 2 and 4 core Celeron and 4 core Atom chips that has shown up in many laptops running Windows or Chrome . That series continues with smaller nm scale Plenty of stick computers have been sold with Atom chips.

So Intel has done well with the low power series, the rep of the slow Atom chips that came before the 1.6 and the gap before the newer faster low power series made it hard to get things going on the Atom front. To get the sales moving MS cooperated with 'Windows 8 with Bing' which was Free on under $200 systems which has helped a lot and is continued with Win 10 as you see the with the compute sticks.

So the great sales of Windows Laptops, ChromeBooks, Mimi PCs, Stick PCs and 2 in 1s these lower binned Pentiums have done well overall.

My ASUS X205TA 11.6" laptop gives 8 hours runtime and has sold like hotcakes as has Atom models from other makers.

I turned off most of the whizzbang UI effects and quick start (not needed) stopped or de-installed most live tiles installed Classic Shell. This laptop street price $140-199.

This Updated Atom Laptop $250 is a great deal.

https://www.amazon.com/Ultrabook-oBook11-1920x1080-Windows-Multi-language/dp/B01FFDC2CU/ref=sr_1_61?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1471461265&sr=1-61&keywords=11.6%22+atom+laptop

Would I like to have a 4 core dual mem channel faster Celeron or new Z8300 Atom 64 bit Win version? Yes.

So Intel is still in the game and improving it's lower power mobile market.

I guess if it wont play AAA 3D games it's garbage.

 

[bit_user]

I knew it! I was sure they had this in their back pocket, as a hedge.

 

[bit_user]

seriously Atom CPU were and still are pure garbage, any ARM chips runs circle around it, can't do anything on that stupid atom cpu

This is going too far. First, newer Atoms are much better than the originals. Secondly, when did you compare the exact same software on both?

Yes, ARMs have maintained a strong lead in perf/W, but not so much that I'd call recent Atoms pure garbage.

 

[RedJaron]

seriously Atom CPU were and still are pure garbage, any ARM chips runs circle around it,
can't do anything on that stupid atom cpu

Circles in what tasks?

Older Atoms had problems. Newer ones, since Silvermont, have been quite good. Sadly, they still have the stigma of the older chips and people think Atom is still a dirty word in the CPU game. No, they don't offer performance levels of the i3, but neither does an ARM chip in the same pricing bracket. Newer Atoms in small tablets and 2-in-1 devices are more than adequate for basic use.

 

[artk2219]

Ah atoms and contra revenue. What gets me is how beema and mullins were direct and very good competition, yet we almost never saw any small pc's, sticks, or tablets thanks to the rebates intel was giving on atom.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corps-contra-revenue-strategy-was-a-huge-was.aspx

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10244/compulab-fitletxa10lan-review-a-fanless-amd-ucff-pc-for-networking-applications/3

 

[jasonelmore]

this news is HUGE! although i'm not to keen on having apple use all of intel's 10nm capacity and delay desktop cpu's which is what happened with GPU's with TSMC. Apple bought all the capacity for the first 6 months, and delayed everyone else from getting any silicon baked.

 

[bit_user]

... which is what happened with GPU's with TSMC. Apple bought all the capacity for the first 6 months, and delayed everyone else from getting any silicon baked.

I'm actually not so sure about that. See, desktop GPUs are necessarily very big, whereas mobile SoCs are comparatively rather small. Big = expensive, especially on a new process, and doubly-so, if yields aren't great. So, I think it wouldn't have been economically viable to fab GPUs at 14/16 nm much sooner than they did. And even now, Nvidia is still struggling to meet demand (due, in part, to yield problems... or so suggests semiaccurate, on the free side of their paywall).

Now, regarding Intel's 10 nm... let's keep one thing in perspective, here. As far as I'm aware, Intel is still in full control of its fabs. I think it's safe to assume that no one is going to prevent them from using their own fabs as and when they deem it strategically valuable to do so.

And, they've been fabbing others' chips, for a while. So, it's not even like this is an entirely new situation.

 

[jabliese]

Used a couple brands of Atom based handhelds, they are junk.

 

[alextheblue]

That's one of the hidden future benefits of UWP. Once you get enough UWP apps, you can release a second ARM variant of Windows (they already have W10M) and this time you'll have an instant library - the UWP apps are architecture agnostic and are cloud compiled. Granted, they don't have any motivation to do that at this time, even for tablets. But they're looking ahead and not letting themselves be locked to Intel.

This is a wise move if you look at what Intel is doing with Atom. On the low-power tablet front there's no direct replacement for Cherry Trail, hence the lack of a non-Pro Surface 4. Yes Intel has other low-power chips but the Core series is rather expensive compared to Cherry Trail, hence being limited to Surface Pro in their lineup.

Then again they may not have to jump back to ARM if Zen scales down low enough, a 2 core 4 thread low-power Zen might be able to take the place of the retreating Atom 4C/4T low-cost lineup.

 

[Roryiscool]

seriously Atom CPU were and still are pure garbage, any ARM chips runs circle around it,
can't do anything on that stupid atom cpu

Pretty sure it was the other way around, not to mention the overclock headroom on some of those atom chips. Even todays Atoms will be much quicker than what ARM can offer. Speed was not the issue; it was form factor and power usage.

 

[Wisecracker]

Intel has tried this before - in 2010/2011. No one took the bait.

It looks like LG is willing to roll the dice with Intel this go-round in their battle against Samsung and Apple. Good luck with that.

 

[bit_user]

FWIW, MS used the Cherry Trail SoC (based on Silvermont Atom cores), in Hololens. Since it runs Windows 10, and that supports ARMs, they should've had the option to use a range of mobile & tablet SoCs. So, I guess that's one feather in Atom's cap.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mcirosoft-hololens-components-hpu-28nm,32546.html