Since the beginning, this year has been greatly marked by news regarding Intel's Atom processor, a product the chip manufacturer sees in many of the Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) that will allow people to interact with each other in the future. The company wants to extend the use of the Atom processors from handhelds to desktops, and the world has already seen the first 45nm products of the CPU series. Still, for the time being, the deployment of the Atom processor is not going as fast as Intel would expect it to.
While the production capacity of the company rises up to about 2,500 Atom processors on a single 300mm wafer, the testing facilities seem to have reached saturation at the current production level. Yields are reportedly good enough, but the Santa Clara company has a testing line problem, and it does not seem to be easy to fix. A simple solution for the chip giant would be the conversion of some test lines validating other processors at the moment over to Atom, yet it would only mean transferring the problem from a product line to another. According to Infoworld, Intel needs to concentrate on testing products that have significantly higher selling prices.
As we all know, the netbook market registered a continuous growth lately, and Intel might be forced to change its focus on Atom, otherwise it will lose design wins. The number of netbooks that have been introduced this year is impressive, and it all started with ASUS' EEE PC, yet the market is filled now with machines from MSI, Acer, Gigabyte, ASUS, Dell, HP, Everex, and a lot of other companies.
The only strong competitor Atom would have is VIA's Nano, and HP is the sole leading company that showed interest in the processor up to date. Still, if the market continues to face an Atom shortage, there are good chances for other companies to turn to Nano as well, and even the smallest gain would mean a lot for VIA. Nano cannot power a lot of netbooks or MID devices, because of its overall power consumption, but it can fit just fine into plenty of higher-end systems.
Advanced Micro Devices does not seem to be interested in the netbook market at this moment, although an AMD-class netbook processor is rumored to come in the near future. Dirk Meyer announced the processor for November, yet there are some who do not expect it to appear anytime sooner than the mid 2009. Intel is expected to have solved the validation problem by then, considering that its Vietnam facility will be online as scheduled.
VIA should benefit the most from Intel's constraint, yet the Santa Clara company will keep a close eye on Atom's growth for sure. It may also convert some of its validation lines over to Atom to maintain a good presence of the processor in as many first-generation netbooks as possible.
Other news concerning Intel come from the software area, where we've learned that Linux developer Opened Hand announced it had been acquired by the chip manufacturer. This way, Opened Hand will be a part of the Intel Open Source Technology Center, focusing on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, said to be "an open source community for sharing software technologies, ideas, projects, code, and applications to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Netbooks, and embedded devices."
The focus of Moblin.org is set on developing for the Atom processor, as well as the "low power, low footprint, high performance, wireless, and graphics" capabilities Intel would like the MID devices to offer in the future. As Vista does not offer a compelling experience on netbook-class hardware, Intel's purchase of Opened Hand, which has a lot of experience in Linux handheld development, shows the company's approach regarding the netbook OS world.
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