Intel rides the wave of the Atom
Intel Corporation has had an excellent 2008, despite the economic crisis affecting most of the world. It has continued to smite AMD and the Intel Atom processor has taken the world by storm.
Intel (and the world) was very impressed when Apple converted to Intel chipsets in 2005. Major rival AMD has not had a truly competitive processor in a couple of years. But this may have been the best year yet: the year of the Atom. The company’s lesser-is-better netbook processor has garnered most of the attention in that marketplace and brought many new netbook makers into the fold.
It is not only the small netbook makers that are flocking to the Atom processor, though there are also a lot of those. Intel has added major vendors like Acer, Asus, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba to its client list. This conversion happened very quickly indeed, with Intel taking over virtually the entire netbook processor marketplace in a single year, according to a CNET story.
Both AMD and Qualcomm were almost completely left in the dust by the speed of the Intel Atom takeover. AMD, who had helped to pioneer the netbook path with its Geode processor in the small XO notebook which preceded the netbook, was left with very few sales in the netbook marketplace. Qualcomm had a significant investment in the production of a chipset for an always-on small laptop, valuing constant connectivity over processing power, but quickly lost that battle to the Intel Atom.
Now, the other chip manufacturers and related vendors are restructuring to fit themselves into the Intel Atom world. AMD is planning to introduce a rival processor at the Consumer Electronics Show. Nvidia and Qualcomm are considering how they may fit into the equation. Even Microsoft says Windows 7 will be netbook-ready from the start. 2009 promises to be an interesting year for the netbook, and for netbook marketplace watchers.
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