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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think Intel lost the plot around the time they killed Atom. Atom launched as a garbage product, then they spent a decade refining it into an incredible combination of price, performance, and power consumption. Then they killed it and replaced it with processors that offered barely 10% better performance per watt at five times the MSRP and they wonder why the Intel tablet market is dead. It's dead because they strangled it in the crib by pretending Pentium Gold Y-series was an adequate successor to Cherry Trail.

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They didn't kill off the Atom line, they just dropped the Atom naming [0][1]. They are typically also dirt cheap [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremont_(microarchitecture)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracemont_(microarchitecture)

[2] https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Nucbox5-Desktop-Computer-Windo...

I think Intel's tablet ambitions and their larger Atom ambitions died because they tied them to Microsoft.

The Atom could have been bundled as an easy to integrate SoC for things like set top boxes, routers, and smart devices running Linux/Android The sort of uses that go for MediaTek or AllWinner ARM SoCs. Intel had all the peripheral IPs to make competitive offerings.

Instead they put the Windows millstone around the Atoms' neck and the chip sucked. Intel based tablets sucked because Windows was a dog shit OS for low end devices. The few Atom based Android tablets that got made were pretty decent devices.

I've got a bunch of Bay Trail devices lying around. The ones I've put Linux on end up being very useful little devices that run very well. My Windows Bay Trail tablets are just e-waste at this point. They're difficult to use at best and typically just slow pieces of crap.

Atom is still around, though the brand name is only used for Networking and Industrial stuff these days. Here's a couple of the recent product lines:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam...

The Atom lineage also lives also lives on as the E cores in current Intel desktop and laptop CPUs. Its also coming to the server market next year as the high density, all E core Sierra Forest.

They also killed off larrabee right before the GPU market took off. Even if they were behind on it there was so much potential.

Killing larrabee was the right move. That project was a joke architecturally - they got absolutely nothing right. Wrong problem, wrong solution, wrong time, poorly executed.

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