After proudly claiming that its small-sized, low-power Atom processor is the product most suitable for the worldwide weak economy, Intel has recently announced that it will drop the Centrino Atom brand, opting instead to use just the Atom labeling across this part of its product line. Certainly, it looks like the Atom has become one of the company's main focuses, as well as a real profit maker.

"Basically, we are simplifying and coalescing our efforts around 'Atom' as the single brand for Internet devices," said Nick Jacobs, a company spokesman in Singapore.

For those of you that are not in the know, the Centrino Atom brand name, which was used for only five months, referred to a chip package that was formerly codenamed Menlow. It included an Atom processor and a single-chip chipset, and was designed for small, handheld computers that Intel calls Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs. Unfortunately, unlike the netbook market, this segment has been slow to take off, with only a small part of the devices being released in a timeframe spanning from the date when Intel launched Centrino Atom at its Intel Developer Forum conference earlier this year.

The difference between the Centrino Atom and the Atom platforms is that, in case of the former, the package includes a CPU on a single-chip solution, whereas the Atom platforms used a different version of the Atom processor and a traditional two-chip chipset.

It appears that hardware makers have been notified of the change of brand, with MIDs now being branded with Atom stickers, instead of Centrino Atom ones. The change, which will most definitely favor both Intel and the hardware manufacturers, comes just as the Santa Clara-based chip maker is getting ready to release its dual-core version of the Atom processor, as well as the Core i7 processors that will eventually replace the company's current Core 2 brand.