Atom will power inexpensive laptops and wireless devices
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Intel Corp. on Monday put some weight behind the forthcoming launch of its low-power, Austin-designed processor, code-named Silverthorne.
The world's largest chip company designated Silverthorne and its related chips as part of a new product family to be known as Atom, which is aimed at two emerging markets: hand-held Internet access devices and small, low-cost laptop computers. Intel expects both of those markets to be part of what drives its sales growth.
The launch of the new chips is still a few months away, but Intel officials said Monday that the new Atom product family signals how much importance the company is placing on its Austin-designed chips. The new chips can run Windows software, and they consume about 1/20th the electrical power of Intel's most popular chips. The Atom processors will consume 0.6 watts to 2.5 watts of power depending on how fast they run, compared with Intel's Core 2 Duo processors that consume about 35 watts of power.
"We are signaling to the market that this chip family is different enough and important enough to warrant its own brand," company spokesman Bill Calder said.
Intel's Austin design team began work on Silverthorne in 2004 to create a chip with exceptionally low power consumption to make it suitable for portable devices that would primarily connect to the Internet over wireless data networks.
Analysts say the new chips are expected to go into products that cost less than $300.
Intel executives said that the chip — with its simplified design — is its smallest and lowest-power processor yet. Eleven unpackaged Atom chips would fit in an area about the size of a penny, which indicates the chip will be inexpensive to manufacture.
"This is pretty significant," said analyst Dean McCarron of Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Ariz. "Atom is not a traditional product, and it really needed is own category and its own name."
Intel wants the chips to be used to create new growth markets, but it doesn't want Atom to cannibalize its existing business, McCarron said.
The market interest in the new category was sparked by the successful introduction of the Eee PC low-cost minilaptop late last year by Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc. When sales of the Eee took off, industry insiders were convinced that there is pent-up demand for ultraportable Web access devices that are small and cheap.
"The Eee PC was a hero product," McCarron said. "It caught a number of people by surprise."
