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Death, Taxes and Intel
Atom Attacks Embedded (Jim Turley)
Three things are certain in the engineer’s life: death, taxes, and Intel dominance.
One of those is not actually true. Although “Intel” is the name that comes to mind when the topic turns to microprocessors, the company’s famous chips account for barely 2% of all the microprocessor and microcontroller chips sold each year. (That’s counting units, not dollar value. The revenue picture is quite different.) The other 98% of the world’s microprocessors all come from somewhere else.
ARM, for example, creates at least five times more 32-bit processors every year than Intel does. But since ARM-based chips get buried into embedded devices instead of high-profile PCs, the general public is rarely aware of them. Like insects in the global ecosystem, embedded processors are everywhere – and nowhere.
Now Intel wants a piece of that other 98 percent. Not content to be the carnivore at the top of the food chain, the company also wants a piece of the insect action. Well, lower primate action, anyway.
Enter Atom, Intel’s latest microprocessor family designed especially for embedded systems. Atom is at once completely familiar and totally new. It’s a combination of the world’s oldest surviving microprocessor design and the newest semiconductor manufacturing. It’s a dinosaur with carbon fiber wings, a coelacanth with scuba gear.
Atom is Intel’s brand new low-power x86 microprocessor family. Before your oxymoron detector goes off at the use of “low power” and “Intel x86” in the same sentence, bear in mind that power consumption can be a squishy metric. Efficiency is in the eye of the beholder, and what one engineer calls a low-power processor another might call a space heater.
Be that as it may, Atom is certainly the most power-miserly processor to ever execute the x86 instruction set, and it’s certainly the most power-efficient processor from Intel. AMD, Via, Transmeta, Rise, Montalvo, and other companies (mostly dead now) have all tried (and generally failed) to produce a low-power processor that could run the gamut of Intel’s massive x86 software base. Some were x86 compatible; some were low-power. Atom is both. Sort of.
Atom is a clean-sheet design, created specifically to appeal to embedded designers. It’s not a hand-me-down PC processor, unlike Intel’s previous efforts and most of the “embedded” chips that came out of AMD in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, Atom is all new inside, even though it appears just like a Core 2 Duo to software. For those keeping track at home, Atom was developed under the code names Silverthorne and Diamondville (the difference is only in the packaging). [more]
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