3 ms·

Intel is not exactly lacking in competition these days, either. The ARM/mobile threat is pushing really hard against Atom.

• joshuapants 12y ago
  Intel is definitely making a play for the low-powered market (including wearables and embedded) and experiencing an uphill battle, but they're still pretty much uncontested everywhere else. I seem to recall some discussion of ARM trying to move into servers but I haven't heard anything about it since.
• revelation 12y ago
  I always have this bad feeling when it comes to Atom, like they are intentionally crippling it and are not exactly giving it a proper shot. They are so far ahead on the raw manufacturing that the Atom should have no problem stomping the competition outright, yet it's barely scraping by.
  • throwaway2048 12y ago
    Early atoms where unquestionable intentionally crippled. During the netbook era, by leaving out stuff like out of order execution, SSE functionality, no x86_64 bit extensions and forcing vendors to bundle crappy intel GPUs and limiting systems to 2 gigs of ram and XP only. I'm shocked there was never a lawsuit over this. Its hard to say how much that continues today, but one gets the distinct impression that atom is still held back much like the other low end intel processors (pentium, celeron) with stuff like AES-NI and AVX disabled. Seems to be part of a ploy to preserve high end margins and fend off ARM on the lowend with "just barely good enough" chips.