14 DAY TRIAL // Atom central processing units have been selling rather slowly over the past few months, and with Intel not mentioning the brand much lately, it is likely that they do not have long to live.
Intel recently published its financial results for Q4 2011 and the whole year, but even with overall record sales it wasn't able to stave off the decline of one particular CPU series.
According to the report, the revenue brought in by the Atom micro-architecture was of $167 million, or 129.23 million Euro.
This figure would not seem small on its own, but comparisons with the third quarter of 2010 show a drop of 38%.
Not only that, but the fall compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 is even larger, of 57%.
Atom is Intel's series of central processing units for low-cost and low-power systems and mobile products.
It had a very good run while netbooks were still a hot product, but that all changed when tablets showed up.
It did not help Intel's case that the ARM architecture chose that, of all times, to start expanding beyond the confines of the smartphone segment.
Had the NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Qualcomm Snapdragon not appeared, Intel's Atom would not have much competition.
As it is, though, the chips are very far behind now, to the point where Intel did not even specifically mention the Atom brand during its latest conference call with financial analysts.
While it did speak about ongoing efforts to score tablet and phone design wins for the Medfield chips, the Atom brand itself was not even named.
One may presume that the Santa Clara, California-based IT giant is stealthily and slowly letting go of the Atom name, so as to distance itself from the series' reputation of so-called 'inferiority' in terms of power efficiency, compared to ARM units.
That said, the chips themselves won't disappear, even if netbooks and the Atom brand do (which is, in itself, just speculation). Intel already has Saltwell (32nm), Silvermont (22nm) and Airmont (14nm) units in the pipeline.