I’m working on a detailed report about Atom and the mobile computing market right now but its going to take a few more days to finish it so I wanted to put something brief out there for people interested in UMPCs. Many of you know that I have a wide-ranging definition of UMPCs but many, if not most others in the industry (and I might have to fall in line with this at some point) accept UMPCs as mobile desktop computers. Professional devices that give you the desktop operating system in a mini tablet or mini laptop form factor. In 2007, Intel talked about the Ultra Mobile market and introduced a mobile-optimised CPU aimed at enabling it. They also promised CPUs that would be designed from the ground up for mobile computing and introduced the term MID which was seen as a sub-ultra mobile PC by most people. The hope for many ultra mobile PC fans was that the new CPU would be much more powerful than ‘Stealey’ and would enable real Vista-capable ‘pro-mobile’ UMPCs. That was never really part of the plan for Menlow and after this week, its very clear where the focus is now. Menlow/Atom is a platform designed to be cheap and power-efficient above everything else. Cheap means small. Small means less space for transistors. Less transistors means less processing capability!
The reason Atom needs to be cheap, small and power efficient is that it will be 1) going into tiny devices that need tiny motherboards and small batteries. 2) Will go into consumer electronics that won’t bear any increases in component cost. 3) Relies on millions and millions of sales to stimulate the device into being the de-facto solution for all consumer internet-capable appliances and gadgets, mobile or not.
UMPCs are not seen by Intel as consumer gadgets that sell multi-millions and therefore Atom is not designed for them. Atom will scale up to productivity devices but it won’t return any significant processing power advantages. The target for the Atom concept is the smartphone, not the 7″ Vista device. It might take another generation to get to the smartphone but that’s where they are heading with this.
If you’re a traditional Origami/ultra mobile PC follower looking for a more powerful, longer battery life device, you need to forget Atom and take encouragement from the devices appearing with the ULV laptop parts. Having played with the Q1 Ultra Premium and seen nearly 6 hours battery life after doing a video encoding exercise and knowing that it isn’t going to cost much more than the existing models I feel certain that as the new wave of processors from both Intel and VIA are engineered into lower clockrate, ultra low voltage parts, there’s going to be some very good opportunities to make UMPCs that are far more powerful and far more portable than the devices of 2006 and 2007.
