Friday, June 25, 2010
We’re currently going on Intel’s 3rd generation Intel Atom processor. First the N270, then the N280 and now the N450 processor for this year’s netbooks. Apart from a couple of hours extra battery life, perceivable performance stays the same and the processor hasn’t moved past the 1.6 - 1.66GHz clock speed for years. This has been an ongoing topic but it’s the first time I’ve seen Intel say the following…
Intel explains that it’s a marketing decision to keep the Atom where it is.
It “doesn’t need to be any faster”.
“Where are now is the best solution for the needs of the segment.”
Any faster and the price of netbooks go up and they get less battery life then you enter CULV notebook territory. I don’t think Intel can get better battery life out of the Atom while improving battery and keeping costs low. There’s also the threat from ARM chips and smartbooks looming around the corner which I think has Intel wanting to focus fully on battery life. I think I’ve said the same thing in previous posts numerous times anyway….
Source: APC Mag.
Translation: “If we make it any faster, we won’t sell our more expensive stuff.”
This is just like when they were dissing the Ion as overkill, and the translation for that was: “We don’t have anything that even remotely competes with NVidia or ATI, so we’ve decided you don’t need it.”
Intel makes good processors, but their business tactics are so dirty. They stifle innovation in some respects.
Explains pretty much perfectly why pine trail sucks:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3728
Basically if they redesigned atom around an IMC rather than just fabbing down the north bridge and plunking it onto the same piece of silicon as the same old cpu pine trail could have been 30% faster (or more, as the performance of order archs like atom are terrifically sensitive to memory latency) with a negligible to no increase in die size or power draw (it could have actually used less power/instruction than the existing pine trail because of all the unnecessary logic on there now for passing data over a noisy, high frequency and error prone electrical bus that doesn’t exist anymore).
Really the only thing that keeps poor designs like diamondville (180nm process for the northbridge in a low power device? really?) and pine trail (rant above) selling is the fact that intel has a monopoly on the low power x86 market.
It seems the only design goals of pine trail were 1) shut technically superior platform competitors like nvidia’s ION out of the market and 2) more money for intel.