Is Intel's Atomic project more about low-cost than high-power portability?

Intel launched its low-power Atom processor at Computex earlier this week, but the device's true raison d'être is a source of confusion for many.

As the Atom begins to show up in low-cost budget laptops introduced at Computex this week, numerous press reports and blog posts continue to peg the device as Intel's ticket into the mobile phone market.

But instead of smart phones and other high-end mobile devices, a new generation of cheap and scaled-down PCs like the Asus Eee should represent the vast majority of Atom design wins this year and next, analysts say.

“Atom will enable a whole new class of [laptops] that are much less expensive than current products,”" Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight64, said. "These will be [laptops] for £125 to £150 that will not have the capabilities of today's full-priced [laptops]. They will be for people who just want something that can handle their email, a little bit of web access, and maybe a more child-proof keyboard that won't be destroyed if you spill something on it."

The confusion about Atom largely stems from how Intel's PR team has positioned the device, Jim McGregor, an analyst for In-Stat says.

"Atom is a processor core aimed at a whole plethora of cheap products," McGregor says. "But Intel has put all of its marketing and PR effort into promoting it as a processor solution for high-end mobile devices, ranging from a new generation of hand held devices up through emerging PCs. But nobody really knows when and if these markets are ever going to take off."

A low-price processor for low-price laptops

In the immediate future, OEMs will mainly look to Atom's cheap price and largely stripped down performance with a single "in-order" pipeline that dates back to the original Pentium chip for inexpensive and lightweight laptops. Intel would not disclose pricing, but the OEM price of $45 for the Intel Atom Z500 certainly makes it a good fit for portable devices. (The Z-Series processors are intended for handheld use, but are architecturally identical to the N-Series chips for laptop use.)

Examples of no-frills laptops with the Atom inside include the Asus Eee, which is expected to soon launch with the processor. There is no word on the upcoming Atom-based Asus Eee's pricing, but suffice to say a sub-£150 price point should make it competitive.

Other launches include the MSI Wind, which will retail for £319.95 with Linux or £349.95 with XP Home when it reaches retail channels in a few days.

Sharp debuted its first Atom-based laptop earlier this year, called the Willcom D4. Slated for launch in June in Japan at a retail price of ¥90,200 (£435), the laptop will have a 1.33GHz Atom processor and a 5in display, 1Gb RAM, 40Gb hard disk, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

More launches will follow at this week's Computex as OEMs seek to appease consumer demands for cheap and portable PCs to be used essentially for office applications and internet connectivity. According to McGregor at In-Stat, OEMs should eventually launch laptops with the Atom that will retail for less than £150.

So far, however, the battery life of the Willcom D4 has not yet been disclosed, while the Mobile Celeron-powered Eee PC 900 lasts for around three hours of light use. Anecdotal reports suggest that the Atom-powered MSI Wind will last for around three hours too, but its processor packs a more powerful punch. So, it will be interesting to see by how much Atom's much-touted low power consumption will translate into longer battery lives for laptops as they become available during the coming months.

In the desktop space, Tranquil PC has begun to offer Atom-based motherboards for £42.00. Intel's D945GCLF Mini-ITX packs the 1.6GHz version of the Atom with 512K of L2 cache, which Tranquil PC says is more than enough horsepower to handle Vista Home Media Center. The motherboard also offers high-definition audio, 10/100 LAN, PCI, SATA2 (3GB/s), and DDR2 533/667.

The Low-Power Confusion

Intel may have denied the veracity of a report last month that claimed Apple will use the Atom in an upcoming iPhone, but by then the story had run riot all over the internet. Indeed, the iPhone story is but one example of the confusion about the processor's place in future products as it is often incorrectly assumed that Intel hopes to use the processor to enter the mobile phone market in the near future.

The hype surrounding Atom's supposed future place in the mobile phone market can largely be attributed to a misunderstanding about its low power consumption, which is its main feature. With its new 45nm process, Atom processors offer an Intel-specified thermal design power (TDP) in the 0.65-2.4 watt range in a slice of silicon less than 25mm. The power specifications are significantly less compared to mobile Core 2 Duo processors, which have a typical TDP in the 35 watt range.

Such impressive performance per power-consumption ratio compared to any device Intel has launched to date gave rise to media reports announcing Intel's readiness to take on ARM, Qualcomm, and other embedded giants in the mobile phone space. Yet, it is seldom mentioned that the Atom's power consumption alone, without even taking into consideration its chipsets, would likely consume a significantly higher amount of watts compared to ARM devices, for example, which have over a 90% per cent share in the mobile phone market.

So after Intel first entered and exited the market with its sale of its embedded business to Marvell Technology in 2006, the current-generation Atom will not likely show up in any mobile phone anytime in the near future.

"The first Atom processor is just not face-to-face competitive with the ARM architecture," Jim McGregor says. “[the average power consumption to the 2.5 to 4.0 Watt range] is well out of the range of an ARM processor."

 "They don't get competitive until way down the road with their Moorestown solution, with a single-chip solution in the 2009 and 2010 time frame," McGregor adds. "That is where they are going to start to get the power down, but even at that, ARM will still have an advantage."

Intel's Vision

Despite Atom's imminent place in cheap laptops this year and next, Intel is obviously looking beyond the cheap-and-small lightweight laptop category. As Intel describes it, the firm expects the Atom to find its way in an entire new generation of x86 machines that Intel says will connect "the next billion people to the Internet."

“Atom from a company perspective is the largest bet on a new product that Intel has ever made,”" McGregor says. "It is bigger than XScale, it is bigger than WiMAX, it is bigger than anything."

Intel says Atom is designed to power future mobile devices that it calls "netbooks", along with basic Internet-centric desktop PCs called “nettops”.

As an example, Intel showed off a prototype mobile device at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year that it said will offer real-time text and speech translations within three to five years. While Intel did not confirm that the Atom would power the device, Intel said then it plans to launch an entire new class of devices as early as next year that will feature always-on Internet connectivity wherever you are in a device you can comfortably carry in your back pocket.

Atom is Intel's second processor to debut after the mobile version of Penryn. Like Penryn, Atom benefits from Intel's new Deep Power Down state's C-states extension, which was designed to help overcome the transistor power leakage by reducing power consumption when the processor is in idle mode. Intel also took advantage of its 45-nm process so Atom could pack 47 million transistors in such a small form factor for embedded applications.

Yet, how OEMs will take advantage of the Atom's performance-per-watt ratio has yet to be determined. While one day the processor could power devices that combine traditional x86 PC applications and Internet connectivity with mobile phone capabilities (picture a laptop with an embedded phone), such designs will likely remain in the development stage for years before they ever see launch.

"We don't see this new mobile category taking off, if it every does, before 2010," McGregor says. "And even if it does, this is going to require new business and service models and support from service providers, which Intel doesn't have right now."

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