Chipmakers have long raced to churn out more powerful microprocessors. They didn't pay much heed to heat or battery drain, natural side effects of increased processing power -- until Intel released its new Atom this past summer.
No faster than previous chips, the teensy Atom instead uses a fraction of the usual battery power -- one-tenth, according to Intel. Therein lies the seed of a revolution. BlackBerrys and iPhones don't need chips powerful enough to crack the human genome.
They just need to send and receive email, surf the Web, and snap and store photos without burning through the battery. And because the Atom was designed to digest Flash (unlike the iPhone), it delivers the entire Internet experience. It also opened a new market for the mini PCs dubbed netbooks, which could pave the way to a billion-dollar revenue stream.
Recent Comments | Total
September 20, 2009 at 6:48am by sherone rose
Maybe these players can take on Intel. Transmeta certainly failed miserably. And the thing I always thought was weird about that was that for years we'd all been obsessing on how important processor power savings were in notebooks. But when Transmeta's processors were released, a strange and popular new meme started circulating, which said that "everybody knows that the processor isn't that important, because it's the display that uses most of the energy". Then, after Transmeta ceased to be a threat... it disappeared, and we all went back to obsessing on the percentage of bulktime processors spend in various C states. Very odd. I wonder where such a meme could have come from?
October 1, 2009 at 9:36am by rebecca adams
I think the Atom sounds like a great idea and a huge step forward, especially if it only uses a fraction of the usual battery power.
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