Lately, the Atom core has been making some really big waves around the computer market. Some are saying that it is the future, some that it's a really nice complement and almost everyone is forgetting the old "Intel wants the iPhone" stuff.
The Atom is becoming such a big success that Intel is getting afraid of it, castrating it in full force, wherever it can.
Intel is afraid that the Atom will soon canibalize most of the rest of their market, eating all the way through the lower lines of the Core 2 and leaving nothing were the Celeron stands today, driving the profits down in the same way.
That is the most apparent explanation for what they've been doing to the netbook versions of the CPU and to the desktop platforms.
The Desktop
In the desktop space they have even released a very appealing 330 version which, with it's dual cores and four threads, is able to more than easily run HD 1080p video content, making it perfect for small HTPCs... if not for the awful 945G - which doesn't even have a DVI or HDMI output. This pairing is so deliberate that you, as a manufacturer, can't add more than one DIMM slot to your motherboard design. Same goes for PCI-Express, which the 945 has. No go.
God rid if you give people a chance to built a low-end gaming rig with one of these; especially now that you have PhysX to help it. Good luck gaming on a PCI card, if you can find one.
So no PCI-Express, no more than one DIMM.
The netbooks
The portable, netbook, variations also suffer: you can't find one Atom CPU for netbooks(that's the Z and N series) that has x86-64 support and most also don't have support for hardware virtualization technologies.
The Z models with a clock greater than 1100MHz do have hardware virtualization (the lesser models probably won't ever need it) but the lack of x86-64, when it's already embedded in the die of all Atom processors, is appalling.
While most netbook users probably won't ever need 64bit support, with the apps moving to the web, you might find yourself with a yet capable CPU, in a processing power sense, without the feature capability that would allow it to run up-to-date software. Face it, software is slowing down, cloud computing is upon us, and if profit is to keep going to Intel's pocket, they must do something to keep selling new stuff now and then. Removing x86-64 is a way.
The Yonah cores experienced a similar situation with the lack of PAE but the silicon itself didn't have PAE embedded, it was a bad design decision, not a marketing one.
A dual-core Atom would be perfect to replace Pentium Dual-core laptops and even some ultra low-voltage Core 2s, since the TDP(8W) is similar and most of them run in the 1GHz range. Intel could easily bin dual-core Atom's at 1866MHz(Z540's clock), stick two of them together(2.4W times two), have them priced in the $200 range and still sell them like hot cakes for classy netbooks, ultraportables and on, and on. The current top Core 2 Duo ULV clocks at 1.4GHz and has a TDP of 10W, it costs $286 and takes 82mm^2.
The Atom 330? Fifty-two. Or cheap in semiconductor lingo. Can you say Macbook Air?
Some business decisions are incomprehensible to me and this is one of them. The CPU is smaller, cheaper to manufacture and could be more profitable than current models.
If nothing changes, soon, at the blue camp, we'll have another "Yonah/Pentium M on the Desktop era" - rogue, "underground" and expensive - just this time some lawsuits may actually be involved, judging from the fierceness of the grasp that Intel currently has on the Atom.
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