Talk:Intel Atom

Intel Atom vs Intel Atom Centrino

http://www.intel.com/technology/atom/index.htm anyone know more details about the Centrino, or are they just the same thing? NeoDeGenero (talk) 13:59, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I've not read up on this sort of technology for a few years now but the last time I checked the difference between an Atom and a Centrino Atom solution would mean that the the Atom solution is an Atom CPU with a third party chipset, while a Centrino solution is an Atom CPU coupled with an Intel designed chipset. Basically Centrino is a badge that gets awarded to computers with all intel components (northbridge, southbridge etc).

In fact, to quote the address you posted:

...Intel® Centrino® Atom™ processor technology, a collection of chips enabling amazing Internet experiences in pocketable devices.

--Benchamoneh (talk) 10:40, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

title?

"A 1.8 GHz Atom processor's single thread performance is equivalent to its predecessor Intel A100 " - how's the performance of a 1.8GHz cpu possibly equivalent to a sub GHz cpu? I think some clarification might be needed. Anton 24.201.100.166 (talk) 06:05, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Atom no dual, but single core

Early tests showed Atom had 2 processors in Windows task manager.It was therefor believed the atom dualprocessor was a dual core version. However Atom Diamond ville is a single core processor! With hyperthreading enabled it may seem like there are 2 processors in taskmanager.

So far intel has said no word about releasing a Atom dualcore version anytime soon!

The Intel Atom 330 has a Dual Core processor. Here is a company that sells a board with the 330: the Intel 330 Dual Core Atom powered mini-itx board – D945GCLF2

-cheers H.E. Hall (talk) 15:27, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Merge with MID

I think this is nonsense - you could merge Pentium into Personal computer like this.--Kozuch (talk) 19:05, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. The Intel Atom is just one of many processors used in mobile internet devices... no reason for a merge. ǝɹʎℲxoɯ (contrib) 19:29, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah. Keep the articles separate. They are different things. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 20:12, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that the Mobile Internet Device page speaks not of mobile Internet devices, in the sense of mobile devices that can access the Internet, but about Intel's "Mobile Internet Device" platform. I guess that's why Talk:Mobile Internet Device asserts that "Intel is mentioned because they invented MIDs"; that page also says:

A Mobile Internet Device (MID) is an Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) initiative raised by Intel for consumers and prosumers. Most other UMPCs are designed for mobile professionals.

Unfortunately, "most" is not "all"; the iPhone, for example, weren't first targeted at mobile professionals. I don't know for whom Nokia designed the various Nokia Communicator devices, or whether the Nokia N800 - or, for that mater, the iPod touch - would not be considered sufficiently "mobile" as they support Wi-Fi (and, apparently, WiMAX in the case of the N800), but not any mobile phone Internet access mechanisms such as GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, EV-DO, etc..

I'd argue that it might be useful to have a "mobile Internet device" page that discusses mobile devices that provide Internet access in general (and would therefore go back at least to the Nokia 9000 - which, amusingly enough, had an x86 processor in it, albeit one from AMD) - and a page about Intel's "Mobile Internet Device" reference design, which should probably be called "Intel Mobile Internet Device" to indicate that it's specifically about Intel's design. One could perhaps then argue that the latter page should be merged into this page, but one could perhaps also argue that the chips and the system are different entities and deserve separate pages. Guy Harris (talk) 20:17, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

"Intel Mobile Internet Device" and "Mobile Internet device" pages would really make sense to me.--Kozuch (talk) 21:02, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree. It might be useful to have a generic page but the page about Intel specific MID platforms should not be merged in with pages that describe Intel MID processors (the A100 or the Intel Atom) like this one. If anything needs to be done about this my opinion is the MID page could stand to be renamed to Intel MID and a generic page created talking about MIDs in general beyond Intel MID platforms (and probably linking to the renamed Intel MID platform page). 64.122.14.55 (talk) 16:03, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree, keep them seperate. Colinstu (talk) 18:46, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Merge templates deleted.--Kozuch (talk) 23:22, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Atom NOT a CISC processor!

Whoever wrote this page clearly knows nothing about x86. x86 is the INSTRUCTION SET. Internally since the Pentium Pro all x86 processors have been RISC, with decoders to turn CISC insructions into RISC operations. Thats really basic stuff. Read the excellent anadtech article. I'm on holiday, and do not have time to sort this nonsense out now. Sorry.

• http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276

81.192.137.26 (talk) 15:03, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

You are right, internally Atom is a RISC architecture based on micro-operations. On the other hand, you have to agree that IA-32 is an CISC instruction set. Thusly, Atom has to decode x86 instructions into micro-operations; a method that has remained standard to this day for x86 compatible processors. Enter ARM processors! They come with their own instruction set - which is RISC. So they do not need the translation step and save that die-space/power for more important things. Remember, backward compatibility always comes with some penalty. DanTheMan 84.58.151.228 (talk) 19:46, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

That backward compatibiltiy while having some costs helps ensure that DOS 1 still boots on the fastest IA32 processor out there, so it's not all bad. ;-) Regards, Andromeda451

Background is confusing

The background section is confusing, since it comes immediately after the introduction, and tracks historical rumours (even ones which have proven incorrect). Some speculation is still written in present tense, like "This seems to strengthen speculation that Diamondville is simply a lower-cost[...]". It would be better to add more info before, and move the history (if it is at all needed). Say, one should explain that "there are these two processor lines, which have different codenames, Diamondville and Silverthorne, referring to the same architecture in different variations, one for a target of Diamondville, one for target of Silverthorne" (this is just to give an idea). --Blaisorblade (talk) 15:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Platform power consumption way to high

So far the Intel Atom is using the i945G-chipset, which has several times the Atom's power consumption and thus makes it unattractive as a platform. I would like to see a mention of this fact here. What good is a 2Watt processor if it needs a 10+Watt chipset? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.21.237.60 (talk) 13:19, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Good point. I saw a motherboard based on the Atom that had one fan which was placed, not on the Atom, but on the i945G. Andries (talk) 19:35, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I added a little bit with references I found in another article. - Taxman ^Talk 20:29, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

MSI has a motherboard (model MSI IM-945GSE (-A)) using the 945GSE chipset, which uses much less power than the 945G. A few other companies seem to be offering similar products in Europe. All seem to be using the N270 single-core Atom CPU. The MSI has dual gigE Intel NICs, making it a good choice for a linux-based firewall. --Bobbozzo (talk) 06:34, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Competition

Is the Tegra really competition. Its a ARM part, with no IA32 compatability. ARM has always low power consumption devices and most likely much better W/cycle, MIPS/W and FLOPS/W etc? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.168.216.45 (talk) 14:47, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree that this bit of the article confused me. The Atom is popular because it is a low power x86 processor. Surely non x86 are not competition? If they are, don't we have to open up playing field to many many more processors? 87.194.205.223 (talk) 02:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

The last sentence of this section states that the 945GSE is lower powered, while the caption to the picture states that the 945GSE consumes more power. Either one of the references is wrong and should maybe be "i945G"(?), or the power comparisons should be better specified. (I.e. lower/more power than what?)75.0.21.42 (talk) 02:04, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Readability

Currently this article is incredibly hard to read and follow caused by a few problems. Primary of which is there is very little overview information to provide context for the reader. Instead the article plunges into technical details with full jargon. There should be much more context to ease the reader in. I'm not really so up on the details of all this but I'll try to help where I can. This platform seems poised to be more and more important, particlularly if it keeps getting improved. - Taxman ^Talk 20:29, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

how does the performance compare?

How does the performance of the 1.6ghz atoms currently common in netbooks compare to the "Celeron M ULV 353" used in earlier netbooks? Plugwash (talk) 15:56, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Intel graphics lockin in future versions?

nVidia slides on

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/02/25/nvidia.ion.2.leak/

indicate that the next version of Atom will require Intel graphics, locking out nVidia's Ion platform. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.202.89.125 (talk) 21:36, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

There is no lock-in. There are, now, some n450 (pineview) based devices running third party graphics. It will either offload certain processing to the extra graphics or disable the integrated GMA on the CPU. While you are forced to have the GMA included, on devices where only the GMA is present, a significant power savings is seen over older generation netbooks. In fact, the netbook I, personally, have (with a pineview cpu) has been tested successfully with a broadcom addin card. 173.74.245.34 (talk) 01:33, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Intel Atom Logo

I've found two PNGs available for the Atom logo, but I didn't upload them because I'm not completely sure about their copyright :/ Here are the URLs:

 * http://www.infotechgallery.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2590 (Big One!)
 * http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/intel-atom-cpu.png

--;) Peregrino (talk) 14:35, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Competition, ARM, etc

Ok guys, I made some major changes to the page and would appreciate a second look by those who are knowledgeable about this CPU and platform

- Moved ARM information to competition section

- Replaced reference to brand-specific Nvidia Tegra product in the "competition" section with information on ARM's competing platform which is used by Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.

- Added information on competition between future Atom platform "Lincroft" and next-gen ARM Cortex-A9 based CPUs

- reworded some other sections —Preceding unsigned comment added by Winterspan (talk • contribs) 02:09, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello! I just added the flag about the ARM performances because there are two mistakes: 1) actually it's really hard to find a comparison apple-to-apple; if you know one, just link the reference 2) ARM and Atom are really different architectures, so similar results with syntetic benchmarks could mean nothing: old Pentium 4 Prescott has similar integer performance of POWER 5 processors, but nobody thinks that you can use a Pentium 4 instead of POWER5 in mainframe applications

I know that it's a widespread belief that Cortex A8 will compete with Atom but actually there is no evidence of this, so it's more a commonplace (for someone a hope, I think) than a real fact.

Thank you! =)

Lenovo skylight review provides some information on power consumption. I have been using ARM processors in the embedded space for over 10 years and they provide better MIPS per watt than any other processor. Take a look at coremark benchmarks for the ARM processor a Cortex-A9 scores 11.5, a intel-i5 is 7.9 for comparison. The total system design including memory bus, video, etc all play a role, so you should not take any benchmark as gospel. However this Dubious tagging smacks of FUD to me. I am not sure what a conclusive reference would be to make you remove this tag? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.91.111.74 (talk) 17:34, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

How can you compare MIPS (or MIPS per Watt) when they're different ISAs/architectures? 115.69.133.166 (talk) 23:20, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Could you elaborate? Why isn't it possible? The comparisons of performance-per-watt on different architectures is indeed the point of these benchmarks. 1exec1 (talk) 15:24, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Now that Intel is targeting tablets and has released Android Oak Trail (why they are still "prototyping" Oak Trail devices while simultaneously releasing Ivy Bridge devices to the press is beyond me) Atom tablets to the press, those android benchmarks are probably pretty relevant in comparison. So maybe you can include Quadrant and CoreMark results? Quadrant is supposed to compare whole subsystems accurately (GPU, memory, CPU - but single threaded), coremark specifically benchmarks the cores (multithreaded). PS> just to tempt you to look the numbers up, stock (no overclock) Cortex A9s quadrant benchmarks span about 1250-3050, the Oak Trail Atoms score ~1950. --— robbie ^{page talk} 13:56, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

LPIA?

LPIA links here, but is not explained. --Nomeata (talk) 20:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Low Power Intel Architecture ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.71.9.237 (talk) 23:50, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Availabilty

The bit about availabilty "Atom processors are not yet available to home users or system builders, although they may be obtained preinstalled on some ITX motherboards." the cpu's have been availabe to home builders from the, there are dozens of montherboards availabe, and have been for at least a year.

Clarified as "not available to home users or system builders as separate processors" 87.185.207.97 (talk) 03:19, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Yakacm (talk) 11:20, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Atom + NVidia 9400M = ION is incorrect

Mainboards with an NVidia chipset and an onboard NVidia 9400 video card are marketed as ION - but that's not limited to Intel Atom CPUs, NVidia announced it for other processors, including the VIA Nano -- 195.14.235.189 (talk) 22:25, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

New unlisted cpu: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU K510 @ 1.66GHz

This CPU was seen in the field but is not listed on Intel's Spec Finder site:

cpu family      : 6
model           : 28
model name      : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU K510   @ 1.66GHz
stepping        : 10
cpu MHz         : 1662.309
cache size      : 512 KB
Cores: 2
Hyperthreaded: yes

I guess this "K" series is very new and should be added to the page, but I cannot find any public docs on it yet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benefros (talk • contribs) 16:44, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Some reports are also saying this is a BIOS/firmware bug that is misreporting a D510 as a K510. If that is true, it would explain why you cannot find any details on it. That said, Intel has not been very forthcoming with the Lincroft-based Z6xx line either. 173.50.233.227 (talk) 12:35, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Socket? Self-install / upgrade capability?

Many other Intel processors such as the Celeron, Pentium, Core i and Xeon series can be installed and upgraded in-situ, by an unskilled person, without soldering, using a motherboard socket or slot. This article implies that the Atom cannot be used in this manner, that it requires soldering directly to the motherboard and cannot be upgraded without electronics skills, but the article could be improved by a knowledgeable person making this directly clear (or, if untrue, explaining how unskilled upgrades can be performed). Andrew Oakley (talk) 09:56, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

it does say it, it also shows the chip on a board. also not all of the others can be upgraded, a lot of others in subnotebooks and macs in particular use pentium celeron or core are also bga not pga chocobogamer mine 10:39, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Atom D525 Graphics

Is there any knows limit to the pixel resolution of the internal Atom D525 Graphics? I can not find graphics specs at Intel's processor site. Would be interesting to know if the resolution is limited to 1920 x 1080 and 2048 x 1152 screens can not be used in native mode. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.171.18.148 (talk) 04:09, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Are there Linux drivers for PowerVR graphic core (GMA 500 + GMA 600)?

PowerVR -> "Intel uses the SGX 535 as its GMA 500 and GMA 600 integrated graphics for their Atom platform"

As far as I am informed, there are only some very crappy Linux drivers for this hardware. The manufacturer himself Imagination Technologies doesn't care for Linux at all. Simply google for linux driver PowerVR or for SGX 535 linux drivers

The Linux drivers by intel are reported to be quite good, but how mature are the drivers for the PowerVR?

Missing Atom Serie

E6xx - http://ark.intel.com/products/series/52490

full Atom info - http://ark.intel.com/products/family/29035