atom

While the marquee processor theme at IDF Shanghai is "milliwatts to petaflops," Intel is also set to offer a vision of universal connectivity.

The main theme for the event, which starts Wednesday, Beijing time, refers to "very, very big to very, very small and low power," according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, speaking in a video.

(See: Intel rolls out five new Atom processors.)

"Milliwatts" refers to chips such as Atom, a tiny low-power, low-cost processor destined for ultramobile devices and low-cost desktops typically … Read more

The following is a partial list of the sessions at this week's Intel Developer Forum in China, which runs April 2 to 3. Topics set to be covered at IDF Shanghai include Netbook, Nettop, Bloomfield (Nehalem), solid-state drives, QuickAssist (accelerators), system-on-chip (Tolapai), and USB 3.0.

The items below are taken directly from Intel's own material:

Intel Atom Processor for the Desktop The Essential Building Block for Purpose Built, Basic Desktop Computing Devices: Intel's strategy for basic desktop computing devices. See how the new Intel Atom processor based desktop platforms provide the world's best solution for … Read more

Intel's low-cost Atom processors will be at the core of inexpensive PCs. And inexpensive computers these days often come with Linux.

How do PC companies shave off the last hundred dollars or so to get to $299 or in some cases $199? Easy. They swap out Windows (pricey) for Linux (free).

Case in point: Home Depot, the home supply store, sells a Mirus-branded desktop with either Windows or Linux. Based on the same hardware, one model sells for $419, the other for $299. Can you guess which one is $299? That's a steep price cut--more than 25 percent--for … Read more

Easter's gone, spring is twanging, and we're all skint--still paying off Christmas and saving up for our summer holidays.

But fear not--if you're looking to buy a smartphone with all the trimmings this season, there's a phone available at the moment that's so cheap we had to check it over and over again to make sure we weren't seeing things. Wave hello to the MWg Atom Life, available for 200 pounds ($400).

Similar to the HTC P3600, the Atom Life offers a large touch screen, Wi-Fi, HSDPA (3.5G) and a 2-megapixel camera. But … Read more

Small fries everywhere! A bunch of this week's news focused on tiny laptops of the Eee PC variety: the Intel Classmate PC will reportedly hit U.S. and European retailers; photos of a possible "netbook" surfaced on Flickr; and we saw an Eee PC competitor for the Taiwanese market (release date unknown). Meanwhile, the tiny tablet-smartphone hybrid, the HTC Shift, became available for pre-order on Amazon; we have one in hand and posted a full review today.

Phew! There's no indication of a slowdown, either, if reports of ultra-low-priced Intel Atom CPUs for netbooks are accurate. … Read more

We've seen a lot of activity lately around the concept of low-cost laptops powered by Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 and Atom CPUs, which promise decent performance and small sizes. Now DigiTimes is reporting that the CPUs to power these systems will be priced very aggressively by Intel, which means we should see these new systems at a fraction of the prices we're seeing in the current $2,000-plus UMPC market.

According to the DigiTimes report, "The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, … Read more

Hunting down dastardly captcha hackers and spyware slimeballs is busy work, even for a man as talented as Power Downloader. Power doesn't have a lot of free time, so it's hard to remember to check all the Web sites that are important to him. His solution: instead of surfing a list of bookmarks, Power Downloader uses RSS feeds and FeedDemon to make the news and podcasts come to him.

FeedDemon is one of the best programs for managing your RSS collection. The interface is slick and easy to personalize, which is important since Power wasn't too impressed … Read more

Intel's upcoming Atom processor is all about cost. And the Atom-based Nettop desktop cuts costs right down to the bone.

Though Atom Netbooks such as future Asus Eee PC notebook models have been described in the press, the Nettop concept is not so clear. So, what is a Nettop?

The Nettop falls under the rubric of Intel's "Basic PC" category, whose underlying thrust is penny pinching. Cost will range from $100 to $299.

The Nettop is centered on the low-cost "Diamondville" variety of the Atom processor but incorporates a number of other cost-saving measures … Read more

Atom, Intel's new processor family for small devices, has barely been announced, and yet already one German tech site has posted some benchmark results. ComputerBase is reporting that its 1.6GHz Atom chip fell slightly behind a 900MHz Celeron M chip on the Super PI benchmark.

That may not be enough to run an actual laptop (the 900MHz Celeron is best known as the chip inside the stripped-down Eee PC) but it should be enough for the mobile Internet devices that are destined to incorporate the new platform. Besides, energy efficiency, not performance, is the Atom's main selling … Read more