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Comment by acroyear | Hacker News Reader

Atom was shit. A desperation move. I was so embarrassed to recommend a Poulsbo laptop to friend, it was the worst machine I have every seen.

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The early Atoms had pretty good performance per watt compared to Intel's other offerings. The whole 'netbook' and 'nettop' market segment was pretty much enabled by the Atom chips, and similar machines are still around nowadays. The E-cores found in recent Intel generations are also very Atom-like.

about a year after 'netbook's came out, the iPad was in the wild and it destroyed any chance of these ever catching on.. sure, they were cheaper, but the user experience on a tablet was just so much better. (and tablets got cheaper fast)

I basically only see them referenced mockingly these days but man I loved the netbook era. A 200 dollar computer dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP (just to play Counter Strike 1.6 and Age of Expires) was a dream come true for high school me.

I got the original iPad as a graduation present and as futuristic as it was ended quickly lost its lustre for me thanks to Apple's walled garden.

Took a few more years until I was rocking Debian via Crostini on the first Samsung ARM Chromebook to scratch that low cost Linux ultraportable itch again (with about triple the battery life and a third as thick as a bonus).

I feel like the 2012 atoms made some sense. What baffles me is that atom was complete shit until 2020. Intel sold laptop chips in 2022 that didn't support FMA or AVX2 because they used an atom designed e-core that didn't support them.

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