Intel is sort of used to delays in its own production line, if we're to consider the recent news about Intel postponing the official release of the Nehalem processors, as well as not being able to ship the Atom CPU until September 2008. On top of that, it appears that Intel also had some difficulties in bringing the Atom to light, according to a statement made by an Intel executive on Wednesday. This being said, it should come as no wonder that Intel isn't able to ship its new low-power Atom processor either.

During a speech at Intel's "research day" in Santa Clara, California, Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, declared that plans for an "Atom" processor had been made as early as 1999. Back then, he said, the project wasn't "received enthusiastically" by Intel's senior staff. According to Rattner, the idea behind the initial design was to create a chip that could perform well with reduced power consumption, based on the Pentium microarchitecture.

Although Intel's board was fine with the idea, the development of the chip stalled soon after that. The concept was reinitiated in 2002, when the company's labs in Austin, Texas came out with Snocone, a new low-power microarchitecture. Once again, the goal of creating an x86 processor that could run typical PC applications with a low level of energy use was brought back into the limelight.

Unfortunately, it took a while to begin development, or to be more exact, until 2004, when Intel's management was finally convinced of the new chip's potential. Since 2004, Intel has been working on the Atom processor, which was officially released this year but is yet to surface the market. The Atom family is separated into two different designs, code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville, respectively, which should power netbooks like the Eee PC or even smaller-sized Internet devices. The Atoms will compete with chips from VIA Technologies, as well as with chips based on designs from Arm Ltd.