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Intel licenses Atom-class x86 cores to startup, firm reportedly sharing RTL, enabling customer to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores
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Sounds like they’re trying a new way of competing with ARM. I doubt it’ll work.
Compete with AMD as well. They don’t license the designs directly, but the reason they’ve dominated the last couple generations of consoles is they’re willing to do custom work where Intel traditionally was more “take it or leave it”
As someone who had a machine with an Atom chip during the height of the netbook phase: [whoa, this is worthless] meme
They aren’t worthless, they are just much more suited for low power embedded systems rather than a general purpose PC.
There are vanishingly few use cases where an anemic x86 would be a better choice than almost any ARM or RISC-V system.
So perhaps not worthless, but close to it.
Atom cores?
Aren’t those called “efficiency cores” nowadays? The ones that are actually less efficient, run at lower clocks and don’t support AVX and Hyper threading?
Atom cores might be the predecessor of efficiency cores, I don’t think Intel calls them that anymore, but I would need to check.
Aren’t the atom cores what they’re putting into a lot of their data centre CPUs currently?
Interesting development for them to do this
I think the efficiency cores in my 32-core i9 are related to the old atom cores but I’m not sure. I think if you want them in your data center class chips will depend very much on what you predict the loading will be like.
Is it the old in-order-execution architecture? 64 bit or 32 bit?
We’ll have to wait and see it seems.