Thursday, July 18th 2013
Intel To Kill Atom Brand
Intel is planning to drop the "Atom" brand name, as it's sounding synonymous with "entry-level" or "cheap." The brand could be actually affecting popularity of Intel's "Clover Trail+" mobile SoCs, which are intended by Intel to compete with high-performance SoCs, under the Qualcomm Snapdragon and NVIDIA Tegra brands. Given how Atom makes up the slowest CPUs Intel has to offer, on the desktop and notebook platforms, its popularity in other emerging platforms could take a hit. Intel could brand Atom successors in its roadmaps to some of its more reputable brands, such as Celeron or Pentium. In the coming few years, Intel will have transitioned entry-level CPUs from its Celeron, Pentium, and even Core i3 brands to BGA (ball-grid array) packages, which could reduce their board footprint to nearly as much as today's Atom CPUs.
Source:
DigiTimes
42 Comments on Intel To Kill Atom Brand
HOWEVER. Don't you dare call your Atoms Celerons, or worse Pentiums, Intel!
That would be too low even for the likes of AMD and their OEM and laptop part naming scheme...
Make up a new one and never link it to Atoms of old. It was a stupid name anyway.
Besides, i'm not sure why Atom would sound "bad". Calling it "SuperDuper Fast Hyper CPU" won't change the fact it's the slowest CPU Intel has to offer. They are mostly present in netbooks anyway, which are budget stuff so why all the fuss about it?
Atoms are weak and inexpensive by desktop standards. But even the current generation is actually very competitive with ARM designs like Tegra and Snapdragon. Mobile OSes have a much smaller footprint, and both the OS and apps are designed to run with far lower system requirements than you'd need for Windows or OSX. The problem is that people see the "Atom" label and think "crappy netbook" rather than "good smartphone". That is the branding problem Intel is trying to solve.
Even mobile devices do the job better. They are killing it because people automatically connect Atom and low performance (so low you can't do anything with it).
hope whatever they call it next, the performance matches the "cool" name...
In actuality, Intel made the Atom brand so notorious, that they can't use it anymore. And this is not undeserved in the least - Atoms just suck and that's that. Even the AMD C50s don't suck nearly as much.
Why not simply call the new, out-of-order execution-capable Atoms "Valence", for example? Intel "Valence" SoC... It'd be a new brand, but that's what would make the tech appear brand new! And to a degree, the name would still imply some connection to the Atom of old, but not nearly as much as Intel would fear.
And, it don't matter to me... a duck is still a duck no matter what you call it.
Got two in tabletbooks and they do just fine for what I expected them to do.