A brief biography of the Intel Atom family
Over the past year, a series of literally galactic cataclysms, both destructive and creative, have occurred in the universe of Intel Atom processors. As a result, it was, one might say, completely rebuilt. In this post, we will recall the history of Intel Atom, talk about the latest developments related to them, and in conclusion we will get acquainted with new models from this family, more similar to Intel Xeon.
Intel Atom was conceived by Intel as a budget solution with minimal power consumption for various kinds of mobile devices. The first Atom appeared in 2008, it was made using 45 nm technology, with time the technical process was reduced to 14 nm. The success of Atom processors was very different depending on the area of ​​their application. So, some of them definitely appeared at the right time and became widespread in the then new-fashioned “netbooks” (“laptops for networking”). Such netbooks compared with laptops on Core processors were not fast, but they were cheap, compact, had no cooler (and related problems), and sold well. Recall at least the super popular ASUS Eee PC 901 , and note that netbooks were produced by such reputable manufacturers as HP, Lenovo, Dell and Sony.
ASUS Eee PC 901
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The fate of the Intel Atom as the x86 competitor of ARM processors for smartphones and tablets was much less successful. Although there is a very noticeable result here - the release in 2015 of Microsoft Surface 3 with an Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor.
It should be noted that Intel did a lot in this key direction - mobile Atoms of the latest generation, which appeared in 2013-2014, were far from their first grandparents in performance, and came close to the capabilities of the Intel Core: they completely updated the graphics core - Intel HD Graphics, micro-architecture changed to out-of-order execution, vector SSE4 instructions added. Nevertheless, the interest to Atoms on the part of manufacturers was moderate: despite decent indicators of energy efficiency (as stated by highly respected resources), the operational advantages were not so weighty as to embark on a large-scale move to change platforms. The financial issue also played a significant role here: Intel Atom was still more expensive than its ARM rivals.
By 2013, it was announced about a dozen models of smartphones on Atom , some of which have not been released in the series. In our country, Orange San Diego-branded Megaphone smartphone was sold under the brand Mint .
Megaphone Mint
Intel actively promoted the Android x86 platform among developers: created development tools, published training materials, held events. Moreover, a unique binary translator was created that worked on all mobile devices with Android based on Atom, and on the fly translated the ARM code into x86 instructions almost without loss of performance.
However, as mentioned above, Atom-based devices were released a little (compared to the number of ARM devices on the market), which led to a vicious circle - independent developers were not in a hurry to release new exclusive x86 applications for these small devices, and device manufacturers , in turn, did not rush to release new models due to the lack of unique applications. In addition, the Atom's theoretical competitive advantage did not work - the ability to run desktop applications on mobile devices of the same architecture. First, it was still necessary to port applications simply because of the mismatch of desktop and mobile OS (Windows or MacOS -> Android) and form factors, and it usually turned out to be even more difficult than the possible transition from x86 to ARM; and secondly, during ARM’s undivided domination in the mobile market, all companies that wanted to create mobile versions of their desktop products have already done this for ARM devices, so the appearance of x86 only added to their hassle - the need to create and maintain versions of the application for different CPU.
Be that as it may, with the global reorganization of 2016, the Atom direction for mobile devices was cut down at the root.
However, the work of the creators of processors is not in vain. In Intel, a new direction appeared, which gradually became one of the key ones: the “Internet of Things”. It is the set of components of the “Internet of Things” that is the optimal consumer of Atom processors with their low power consumption and a wide range of characteristics. So we quietly approached our time.
To date, Intel has released a huge number of models of Intel Atom, but the actual ones are not so much. This is primarily the newly-announced E3900 series (you can see its comparison table above). The series is designed to close the need for high-performance hubs of the “Internet of Things” (more modestly designed to satisfy the Intel Galileo, Edison and Curie platforms).
However, this is not the limit of the "pumping" of the Atom. Here we come to the new announcement. The “server” line of the Atom C2000, a model of the distant 2013, is being replaced by the C3000 series , which is designed to raise the performance of the Intel Atom to a new height. The flagship of the series will be the 16-core model - there have never been so many Atom cores. At the same time, all the “proprietary” features - energy efficiency and affordable price for server models - remain unchanged. So far, information is available on one of the lower -end models of the series - the C3338 processor . Announcements of the rest are waiting in the second half of 2017.
Intel Atom was conceived by Intel as a budget solution with minimal power consumption for various kinds of mobile devices. The first Atom appeared in 2008, it was made using 45 nm technology, with time the technical process was reduced to 14 nm. The success of Atom processors was very different depending on the area of ​​their application. So, some of them definitely appeared at the right time and became widespread in the then new-fashioned “netbooks” (“laptops for networking”). Such netbooks compared with laptops on Core processors were not fast, but they were cheap, compact, had no cooler (and related problems), and sold well. Recall at least the super popular ASUS Eee PC 901 , and note that netbooks were produced by such reputable manufacturers as HP, Lenovo, Dell and Sony.
ASUS Eee PC 901
')
The fate of the Intel Atom as the x86 competitor of ARM processors for smartphones and tablets was much less successful. Although there is a very noticeable result here - the release in 2015 of Microsoft Surface 3 with an Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor.
It should be noted that Intel did a lot in this key direction - mobile Atoms of the latest generation, which appeared in 2013-2014, were far from their first grandparents in performance, and came close to the capabilities of the Intel Core: they completely updated the graphics core - Intel HD Graphics, micro-architecture changed to out-of-order execution, vector SSE4 instructions added. Nevertheless, the interest to Atoms on the part of manufacturers was moderate: despite decent indicators of energy efficiency (as stated by highly respected resources), the operational advantages were not so weighty as to embark on a large-scale move to change platforms. The financial issue also played a significant role here: Intel Atom was still more expensive than its ARM rivals.
By 2013, it was announced about a dozen models of smartphones on Atom , some of which have not been released in the series. In our country, Orange San Diego-branded Megaphone smartphone was sold under the brand Mint .
Megaphone Mint
Intel actively promoted the Android x86 platform among developers: created development tools, published training materials, held events. Moreover, a unique binary translator was created that worked on all mobile devices with Android based on Atom, and on the fly translated the ARM code into x86 instructions almost without loss of performance.
However, as mentioned above, Atom-based devices were released a little (compared to the number of ARM devices on the market), which led to a vicious circle - independent developers were not in a hurry to release new exclusive x86 applications for these small devices, and device manufacturers , in turn, did not rush to release new models due to the lack of unique applications. In addition, the Atom's theoretical competitive advantage did not work - the ability to run desktop applications on mobile devices of the same architecture. First, it was still necessary to port applications simply because of the mismatch of desktop and mobile OS (Windows or MacOS -> Android) and form factors, and it usually turned out to be even more difficult than the possible transition from x86 to ARM; and secondly, during ARM’s undivided domination in the mobile market, all companies that wanted to create mobile versions of their desktop products have already done this for ARM devices, so the appearance of x86 only added to their hassle - the need to create and maintain versions of the application for different CPU.
Be that as it may, with the global reorganization of 2016, the Atom direction for mobile devices was cut down at the root.
However, the work of the creators of processors is not in vain. In Intel, a new direction appeared, which gradually became one of the key ones: the “Internet of Things”. It is the set of components of the “Internet of Things” that is the optimal consumer of Atom processors with their low power consumption and a wide range of characteristics. So we quietly approached our time.
To date, Intel has released a huge number of models of Intel Atom, but the actual ones are not so much. This is primarily the newly-announced E3900 series (you can see its comparison table above). The series is designed to close the need for high-performance hubs of the “Internet of Things” (more modestly designed to satisfy the Intel Galileo, Edison and Curie platforms).
However, this is not the limit of the "pumping" of the Atom. Here we come to the new announcement. The “server” line of the Atom C2000, a model of the distant 2013, is being replaced by the C3000 series , which is designed to raise the performance of the Intel Atom to a new height. The flagship of the series will be the 16-core model - there have never been so many Atom cores. At the same time, all the “proprietary” features - energy efficiency and affordable price for server models - remain unchanged. So far, information is available on one of the lower -end models of the series - the C3338 processor . Announcements of the rest are waiting in the second half of 2017.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/401943/
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