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 aim to make 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 one sized 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.
The newly launched Atom has clock speed of 880 Mhz to 187 ghz and with worlds smallest transistors. Preceding the Atom was the Centrino processor thechnology, 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 from factor, lower cost 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 computers and those that already have computers connected to the Internet but still need secondary devices is big.
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