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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

> Intel Atom could have dominated the market

Depends on what you call Atom, but if you mean Atom as it was released then absolutely no, it had exactly zero fighting chance. IIRC first Atoms were Pentium 4 or so fabricated on smaller process and resulting in lower power draw. The only meaningful use for early Atoms was crappy netbooks.

However, it was or could have been an important stepping stone for paving the road towards x86-based low power devices. Remember, it was also a time where linux-on-arm started booming. It could have been an alternative to ARM SoCs, but there were simply too little attractive offerings and Broadcom/Freescale/Ti effectively ate the market

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I think you’re missing the broader point. The “netbook” form factor was absolutely on to something, but it failed to deliver. The atom processor is what enabled the form factor, and practically set the trajectory for laptops for next 10 years.

Everyone has rose tinted glasses and short memories when it comes to just how far computers have come in the last 15 years. For reference, netbooks predate iPads by 3 years. They came out about the same time as the first iPhone.

The low power long life computing platform has for the longest time been a dream. Netbooks with 4-8 hour battery existed at the same time that a top of the line laptop would get only 3 hours battery life, a normal consumer grade laptop would top out at 1-2 hours, for a 1/4 of the price.

If you squint hard enough, there is no discernible difference between the aspiration of the netbook platform, and a modern chrome book or iPad with a keyboard, but Intel doesn’t make processors for either platform.

> The “netbook” form factor was absolutely on to something, but it failed to deliver.

Completely agree here, I call Atom important stepping stone. However, as you mentioned Intel does not make processors for descendant platforms.

As I have elaborated in different comment, I guess the major reason Atom failed was market positioning. They were effectively eaten by ARMs getting more powerful from one end and mobile CPUs getting more power efficient from the other end.

So while I agree that Atom based netbooks helped start the whole mobile compute market, my argument is that market positioning of Atom products meant that they were destined to be replaced. IMO success of Atom required a bit more useful PC-like devices AND high integrity SoCs for appliances.

The first atoms were their own kind with design principles more from the P5 than even the PPro. It was slow. I'm unsure if it was slower than contemporary Arm, but for sure it had a way lower IPC than the Pentium 4.

IMO, ARM won not because it was measurably faster, but rather because there was an ARM based offering all over the spectrum of SoC needs. In the appliance/embedded market Atom was firmly in the high end and yet in pc-ish market Atom was very much low end.

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