Intel CEO: New dual-core Atom chip coming
Intel will bring out a new dual-core Atom in the second quarter, CEO Paul Otellini said Tuesday during an earnings conference call. — Because Intel already has a dual-core Atom for small desktops, called Nettops, Otellini is likely referring …
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel's Atom roadmap has been accelerating all year: details of the next-generation Atom surfaced in December 2009, and in February the company rolled out a faster Pine Trail Atom for netbooks. On Tuesday's earnings call, CEO Paul Otellini added the missing piece — a second-quarter arrival for a dual-core version, extending into portables what Intel already ships in its Nettop desktop chips.
The timing matters because Intel's ambitions for the chip have widened beyond netbooks: last month the company confirmed it was working with Google and Sony on the Google TV platform to bring Web content to televisions and set-top boxes, giving Atom a candidate role in the living room as well as the lap.
First-order effects
- Netbook makers building on the Pine Trail platform get a dual-core option in Q2, letting them tier product lines above the single-core parts Intel introduced with the February speed bump.
- Otellini framed the announcement on an earnings call, tying the new chip directly to Intel's near-term revenue story for its low-power Atom business.
Second-order effects
- Google TV gives the dual-core Atom a second addressable market: if Sony's set-top boxes and connected televisions ship with Atom inside, the chip moves from portable PCs into the home theater.
- Rival suppliers of low-power processors face pressure to match two cores at netbook-level thermal envelopes, since Intel is collapsing the performance gap that justified alternative architectures.
Third-order effects
- If dual-core becomes the netbook baseline while pricing holds, the category drifts upward toward mainstream laptop territory, squeezing the segmentation between Atom and Intel's own higher-margin mobile chips.
- The pattern points toward Intel pushing x86 into every screen category — handheld, lap, desk, and now television — rather than conceding any class of device to competing instruction sets.
The trend: Intel is marching Atom up the power-performance curve and across device categories, from netbooks into the connected living room it entered with Google and Sony.