TSMC was licensed to build Atom SOCs, remember? but nobody seems to care...

[saaya]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/d...Customers.html

ouch...
well it was a stupid move imo... intel shouldnt try to beat arm at its own game...
you have to know your own weaknesses and strengths and play them right, just trying to beat everybody at their own game will make you stumble and fall over and over...

[Aerwidh]

Not terribly surprised, why change from ARM when it already works?

[zalbard]

Atom is just not as efficient just due to being x86. And there is already a lot of software that can utilise ARM chips.

[saaya]

i dont think x86 is atoms problem...
it being based on netburst is a bigger limitation if you ask me

[Behemot]

i dont think x86 is atoms problem...
it being based on netburst is a bigger limitation if you ask me

Eh, wtf?

[Helmore]

i dont think x86 is atoms problem...
it being based on netburst is a bigger limitation if you ask me

Netburst? Atom has much more in common with the original Pentium architecture. You could just as well say it's based on the original Pentium architecture.

[STEvil]

Problem is the chipsets.

[zalbard]

Problem is the chipsets.

Care to elaborate?

[saaya]

Netburst? Atom has much more in common with the original Pentium architecture. You could just as well say it's based on the original Pentium architecture.

1.6-2ghz, high clocks-low ipc, hyper threading, quad pumped fsb... that sounds like an original pentium to you?

i think even an original pentium at 1.6ghz with quad pumped fsb would have a higher ipc than atom... (per core, not with ht enabled of course)

Care to elaborate?

p45m, and even poulsbo and pinetrails chipset part have at least the same tdp as the cpu cores themselves if not more... and they arent exactly performance monsters, so thats def a weird power budget balance...

i think thats what he means

[Karolis]

1.6-2ghz, high clocks-low ipc, hyper threading, quad pumped fsb... that sounds like an original pentium to you?

i think even an original pentium at 1.6ghz with quad pumped fsb would have a higher ipc than atom... (per core, not with ht enabled of course)


p45m, and even poulsbo and pinetrails chipset part have at least the same tdp as the cpu cores themselves if not more... and they arent exactly performance monsters, so thats def a weird power budget balance...

i think thats what he means

But a big difference is that Netburst was an out-of-order architecture, while Atom is an in-order CPU.

Edit: found a nice read on Atom
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3276&p=1

[Behemot]

1.6-2ghz, high clocks-low ipc, hyper threading, quad pumped fsb... that sounds like an original pentium to you?

i think even an original pentium at 1.6ghz with quad pumped fsb would have a higher ipc than atom... (per core, not with ht enabled of course)

Pentium M has quad FSB, too and it's still so far from Netburst as possible. Core and Core 2 also had quad FSB as a result it was based on Pentium M.

Atom has SMT because engineers probably thought it is worth the power (remember - 0,5% power must be at least 1% of performance). And I see it reasonable - Atom is so slow that even if it will be like a 1,5 core, it is still better (one core for system processes, half-core for others).