Intel Goes Atomic
This Sunday Intel announced its new line of processors targetting the market for pocket-sized Internet devices and slimmed-down computers will be dubbed “Atom.” Intel plans to begin shipping the processors to its manufacturing partners this month.
The name is cute, even if anatomically inaccurate: The microprocessor will measure less than 25 millimeters square, less than a quarter the size of Intel’s Core 2 Duo. It will squeeze 47 million transistors together.
Eleven Atom chips will fit in an area the size of a U.S. penny. The tiny chips are designed for small devices where low-power consumption is key while remaining compatible with the instruction set used by Intel’s Core 2 Duo desktop processors.
The Atom chips run at lower clock speeds, topping out at 1.8 gigahertz, compared with more than three GHz for Intel’s desktop processors, but they will use much less power. Even so, the chips will be able to run Web-friendly technologies built for today’s desktop computers, such as Flash and Javascript.
“Anything that runs on an Intel architecture PC will run on a mobile Internet device,” Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, told Forbes.com in an interview last September
