Intel had to hustle to catch up with competitors in developing chips for mobile devices like smartphones, but the effort led to the development of the highly successful Atom chip, an Intel exec has revealed. Intel kicked off the Atom project in 2004, when it was doing work on developing Arm chips in parallel. At the time the company was “running like crazy” to develop a chip for mobile devices to catch up with the fast evolution of wireless devices, especially voice services, which were peaking at the time.
What an empty article; not really a much of a story.
Yeah. I was hoping for some meat regarding the architecture, things they did to reduce power consumption. Of course, I’m sure we’d be disappointed. They’ll be using power gating and clock gating, and some kind of basic DVFS. But none of the interesting stuff like Razor-style timing speculation (which ARM has been known to tinker with) or leader-follower architectures like Diva, etc. They especially aren’t doing anything really cutting edge like employing awareness of process variation (aside from basic binning).
It’s too bad that Rock has been terminated. I saw their presentation at ISCA. They do some really cool speculative execution that allows them to get their in-order processor to perform as well as ooo processors on memory-intensive loads.
Has it? I thought that was just speculation by 3rd parties.
Edited 2009-07-31 18:04 UTC
Various Sun employees I’ve talked to cannot say one way or the other. But they don’t appear to be very hopeful about it.