The Real Meaning of Atom

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I think you missed it this time Ed. I think you are missing a large portion of the CPU sales that are still going to want performance machines. I think corporate customers are still going to refresh with non-atom processors that will share the R&D cost with the enthusiast. Prices may go up slightly without the Grandmas buying quad-cores but I think the effect will be less than what you think. BTW in the article as you described it who will ending paying for Grandmas R&D?

memphist0 said:

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I think you missed it this time Ed. I think you are missing a large portion of the CPU sales that are still going to want performance machines. I think corporate customers are still going to refresh with non-atom processors that will share the R&D cost with the enthusiast. Prices may go up slightly without the Grandmas buying quad-cores but I think the effect will be less than what you think. BTW in the article as you described it who will ending paying for Grandmas R&D?

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Have you worked in a corporate environemnt?

Every one I have worked in, really could care less about "performance". They just want as much bang for the buck as they can get, while still having enough power for their users to cover 3-5 years.

There are always the exceptions in specialized companies who need the raw power, however they are usually small on the corporate scale.

I do work in a corporate environment. Actually it is an Enterprise consisting of the largest defense contractors. The machines being used by us, the other contractors, and DoD are typically equipped with the best available processor(minus the extreme edition) at that time. Virtually every desktop and laptop we have purchased or recommended for the last few years this is what we have done.

Granted we are talking about engineering companies but even our customers buy workstation grade components.

Forgot..

We upgrade on a three year cycle, sometimes sooner if warranted. And we place orders in thousands for each cycle.

On a related note maybe Doctor's will start paying for our R&D on graphics cards.......

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/PC-supercomputer,5513.html

This seems like the perfect processor for k-12 schools computers. I can also imagine the tremendous power savings that schools will have when they do switch to Atom type processors. This would also implement nicely into all-in-one rigs because of the minimal thermal requirements. I was planing on replacing my 1ghz p3 torrent server with a mobo like this, but with the Atom Mobos already set to appear shortly at >$100 ill wait and test the waters because my sisters 1.8ghz P4 is looking pretty old and inefficient. If the board posts better performance #s than my sisters p4 I think it'll be a great upgrade while substantially diminishing power consumption. I think most people don't understand that "slow computers" usually has nothing to do with processor speed but rather with bloatware, Hard drive speed and memory management. Also memphist0 I don't think your kind of enterprise is whats being targeted.

Double post

The Defence sector plays by different rules than Walmart, amazingly.

Do you think consolidated insurance would pick a $200 CPU over a $2 CPU for its telephone staff?
Some of my minions are still using CRT monitors and they will do until they break and I run out of replacements, and even then, they'll only get a TFT if CRT's aren't a quarter of the price any more.

If a computer can run word, power point, outlook and internet explorer its fine for the needs of virtually every employee in the company I work for.
Accounts, IT and Management need to use some seriously oversized spreadsheets so they might get better PC's, but you could stick 4 atoms together and sell it for half the cost of an E1xxx.

Some people need more than that, but they will pay more for it.

I was talking to a guy that works IT for SAIC(farely large company 40K employees) last night and mentioned to him this story. The point he made is currently his company does not buy Celeron processors for new machines so why would they buy something worse such as the Atoms.

Coincidentally he also on a three year refresh cycle as was told by his management that he needs to replace his servers this summer. The funny part is he was telling me other than increasing storage space his servers are currently under utilized. Yet if he doesn't replace them now he loses the money and wouldn't be able to upgrade later. For Desktop and Laptop refreshes they always take the new computers.

SAIC is a science research company. Again they do not meet the target demographic. has the right idea as to who could use this . Think of the people in your life that use a computer just for and uploading to their , they would be perfect for this computer.

I am young so please help me here. How do they come to this conclusion? why would companies like intel/amd do this? If intel does this, then AMD would just fill in the gaps right?
If so, then I'll buy lots of AMD/ATI products.

"In other words, the desktop world as we've known it will be gone. PC equivalent will be either very high- or low-end, with little inbetween."

Also, how do you have 4 9800GX2 on a 780 amd chipset?

"An interesting side note about the Fastra PC is its motherboard. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the MSI K9A2 Platinum board is not an Nvidia SLI-based board, but uses AMD Crossfire (780 chipset). The simple reason to choose this board may have been cost, but it is unlikely to impact the performance of the system: CUDA does not support SLI at this time, which means that the GPUs have to communicate with each other as well as with the CPU via PCI Express. The researchers claim that they have not seen any impact on performance and the GPUs apparently are scaling well."

...and yet have only 12000 points in 3dmark06

"It isn’t quite a tricked-out gaming system and the 3DMark06 score is just above what your average PC can manage to come with today (12,603 points). "

Intel is making their move now to gear into selling laptops on a much bigger scale and Atom is going to pave the way.

Desktop sales are tanking while laptop sales (especially the ultra cheap laptops like the Asus EE PC which the Atom caters to the most) are booming.

Not only is Intel ramping up production for the Atom, they also are making SSD's and a graphics platform (Larabee). When they unveil their new mobile platform, it'll be almost entirely Intel, CPU, Chipset, HDD, Graphics as an all in 1 package.

I don't know if they'll axe most of the midrange desktop CPU's in the near future, but who knows.

Watts / Power Usage : Performance : Price is the future, not just price : performance anymore.

Damn intel. Why must everyone work there? You know, softwares should gun up their requirements so that people must buy higher end PC or at least force intel into making reasonable CPUs (4.5ghz 4core) lol. However, softwares should also be optimised for multi core and better prioritizing.

Blazing fire said:

Damn intel. Why must everyone work there? You know, softwares should gun up their requirements so that people must buy higher end PC or at least force intel into making reasonable CPUs (4.5ghz 4core) lol. However, softwares should also be optimised for multi core and better prioritizing.

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The problem is, as mentioned above, there is little growth in the desktop marketplace. Particularly the very high end. For instance, how many PC user's need or plan to buy a chip faster than a quad 9650?

You're talking nearly $1,500 for the Q9650, do you *really* think there's a big demand for an $1,800 or $1,900 dollar quad cpu? Truth is, most user's have no idea how to use the cpu power they already have with a good Core2Duo. Gamer's would like faster GPUs, and higher bandwidth busses, but very few user's have a need for a faster cpu, than what is already available.

Intel is not going to be giving away *any* market share, don't worry. They will fight hard to keep every bit of every market niche. That's why they want into the low power marketplace - it's where the current growth is, and they will always follow that growth, but they have no plans of giving away the desktop market share that they've worked so hard to dominate.

Ah! that's good news. At least we know they will contiune to have mid range or mid-high range that most of us will buy. After all, no matter how small we are, we still give them profit, as you've mentioned. Thanks for clearing things up!

Blazing fire said:

I am young so please help me here. How do they come to this conclusion? why would companies like intel/amd do this? If intel does this, then AMD would just fill in the gaps right?
If so, then I'll buy lots of AMD/ATI products.

"In other words, the desktop world as we've known it will be gone. PC equivalent will be either very high- or low-end, with little inbetween."
"

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I think Ed did a decent job of explaining the phenomena in the article. Any R&D that Intel/AMD does is paid for by having consumers buy products based on that R&D. So far the average user has felt that buying newer, faster processors is to their benefit and so CPU manufacturers have been investing money in more powerful architecture.

Arguably the processor power that your average consumer needs has been available for quite some time. For web browsing, checking emails, word processing, etc. I would argue that one could do that just fine with a PIII1Ghz and 512mb of ram assuming a clean install of WindowsXP. Most of the average people I know upgraded their computers not because of lack of processing power but because their computers were loaded with spyware/bloatware.

The market for ultra-cheap, low-power pcs that are good enough for basic tasks is HUGE. There are a ton of people who either won't or can't pay for a ridiculous quad-core 4Ghz machine when they don't need it, and these people greatly outnumber the people who do need that kind of power. The R&D won't stop because there will be demand for high end gaming machines and workstations for companies such as memphist0's. However, the number of people paying for said R&D will diminish and cost per cpu will go up.

Ah. Thank you. You made this clearer

I think MS is doing a decent job of pushing slightly higher hardware requirements Although obviously not requiring real the high-end CPUs stuff like a dual core and 2GB Ram are definitely useful for Vista. Of course the PC of ten years from now will be a totally different beast from now and who knows what killer app may appear in that time.

That's true, and yes, ms does should have better optimistion for multi core and prioritizing.

When our company specs workstations for intensive tasks, we do our best to steer the client towards workstation-level components; i.e., S771 Supermicro or Tyan motherboards, Quadro or FireGL GPU, redundant power supplies, SCSI, etc… The level of reliability and quality for machines built with these components tends to be higher, they carry a longer warranty and have enterprise-class reliability.

Ed is essentially on-target, but what I think we may see is growth in the workstation/server level component sector, as the medical, scientific and engineering communities retire their desktop machines in favor of true workstations. The “grandmas” and low-impact business users will avail themselves of the least-expensive option when, and only when, they are forced to upgrade.