Big welcome for Intel's smallest chip

At the coming-out party of Intel’s all-new Atom processor, two divers plunged into a room-sized aquarium at the Manila Ocean Park to unfurl a banner underwater welcoming the world’s smallest chip.

Intel says it is its “smallest announcement ever” but one that could have the biggest impact on the computing public.

“We aimed to make it (the computer) available to almost everyone,” says Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager of Intel Asia-Pacific. “With the coming of Atom, this could happen very soon.”

The chip, only the size of a fingernail, was based on the revolutionary new low-power Intel Atom microarchitecture and manufactured on industry-leading 45nm Hi-K Metal Gate technology. It was specifically built to power an emerging class of compact mobile devices called netbooks and nettops or computers designed for Internet use and content consumption.

When Intel first introduced its first line of Pentium processors in 1993, it has CPU clock speed of 60-300 Mhz. Comparatively speaking, the newly launched Atom has clock speed of 880 Mhz to 187 Ghz and with the world’s smallest transistors.

Preceding the Atom was the Centrino processor technology, which made computers mobile. “Of course we take that for granted now,” Shenoy says.

To build Atom, the company put together over a thousand engineers to work on the chip which they envisioned to have low power consumption, small form factor, lower cost but not necessarily lower on features.

Atom-based netbooks and nettops thus also consume less power, are smaller than the regular laptops or notebooks, retail for less than half of their full-sized counterparts but not necessarily short of features.

Ricky Banaag, Intel Microelectronics Phils. country manager, says affordability is still the key barrier for ubiquitous Internet use in the country.

As of end-2007, there were only about 4.9 million Internet users locally and only around one million have subscription to a broadband connection.

The opportunity to tap the so-called emerging market, specifically majority of households with no PCs and those that already have PCs connected to the Internet but still need secondary devices, is big.

Spotlight on netbooks or nettops

Intel says there are now more than 60 netbook and nettop designs available worldwide from leading computer brands. Netbooks are available locally from Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, Lenovo, MSI and Neo, while nettops are available from Intel’s channel partners and Asus.

These now very popular devices among students and professionals retail for an average of P20,000 and are fast becoming the device of choice for first-time computer buyers and the advantages are obvious.

First, they are really small, about half the size and weight of a standard laptop, and are easy to carry. This is because the Atom’s micro-flip chip package is 60 percent smaller than a regular CPU notebook, which in turn enables the small netbook form factor.

Second, even as it comes in a small package, the battery lasts as long because of, among other things, a technology called Enhanced Deeper Sleep (C4), which saves power by flushing cache data to system memory during periods of inactivity to reduce power consumption. Another technology in use is the Enhanced Intel SpeedStep, which provides optimal performance at the lowest power. Intel claims a netbook or nettop only consumes 0.6 to four watts.

Netbooks and nettops, however, are efficient Internet devices that can communicate via e-mail, instant messenger, Voice over IP (VoIP) and social networking. They also have MP3 and streaming audio and video and are good enough for basic online gaming. And because these devices are designed for Internet use, one can surf the Web, read news or do research.

In an earlier presentation to journalists, Intel executives say netbooks and nettops are not meant to replace notebooks and laptops or desktop PCs but rather to complement them. 

In a household, for example, that already has two laptops and a desktop PC or Macintosh, a netbook can serve as a device one can carry around for mobility and usually assigned to the youngest member of the family whose computing needs are simple and not heavy on content creation.

Professionals have also been known to carry them around for client presentations or meetings outside the office or when traveling.

Intel announced that the Atom microarchitecture, however, will also be used in other market segments and low-power devices such as mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and future embedded devices.