14 DAY TRIAL // Back in 2008, when the global economic downturn hit, Intel was coincidentally ready with the perfect product for a market that was filled with money-strapped buyers. The Atom architecture provided a decade-old performance for considerably lower power consumption.
The low power consumption achievement is something Intel’s Atom must be commended for, but the fact that they sold Pentium III-like performance as something “new and improved” is definitely something to be frowned upon.
Intel’s trainings were teaching salespeople how to avoid talking about comparable performance and only emphasize on the low power consumption, the Centrino-like processor frequency and the RAM and storage capacities.
Practically, the company managed to get people to buy 10-year-old performance as something new.
Moreover, if the CPU performance was less than modest, the GPU performance was close to zero.
AMD managed to offer a true alternative once the Zacate architecture became available, but Intel never bothered to improve the performance in any way.
Now that Intel’s Clover Trail is coming in netbooks and tablets in October this year, the Atom D2700 will reportedly reach EOL in Q3 2012.
The quite expensive Atom D2550 will go on living for a while longer.