Archive for category Intel

Next-gen Atom platform coming in Q4

It was only last week that Intel received the biggest fine of its corporate life for violating EU antitrust laws in a case with AMD. Not to mention, the other side of the picture rests in the fact that Nvidia has also been complaining about Intel’s Atom pricing structure, and is probably still shaken by the anti-ION propaganda in recent months.

With all backs turned against it, the blue chipmaker is now turning to Broadcom for its HD video processing needs on the Atom “Pine Trail” netbook platform that will be released in Q4. According to a few netbook manufacturers, Intel plans to offer the Broadcom BCM70015 graphics chip as an option to its partners on Pine Trail, which features support for popular codecs such as AVC, H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG2. The other strong feature of this chip is the fact that it can easily run Windows XP, Windows 7 and Linux at relatively low power.

The chip itself has a die area of 10mm² and consumes 30mW when idling. When playing 720p HD content, it consumes a little under 500mW and for 1080p HD content just under 1W. This is actually better than Nvidia’s Tegra, which consumes 100mW when idling and around 2W when decoding at full power.

Can’t blame anyone but themselves

During an Intel investor meeting Tuesday, the company’s head of marketing said netbooks cost some retailers dearly last summer, as they experienced huge return rates due to misinformative marketing on their part.

“In the first period–June, July, August of last year, there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as notebooks,” said Sean Maloney. “They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there, it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster.”

So, basically, they were to blame, not Intel. Maloney claims Intel later approached the retail chains and advised them to market netbooks differently, clearly state up front what they can and can’t do, and this seems to have remedied the problem.

More here.

Numbers and plans

Currently some 70 percent of Intel’s entry desktop segment sales are Atom single-core 200 and Celeron 400 series CPUs, while Atom dual-cores and Celeron dual-cores control some 30 percent combined. Atom single-core market share in Q1 was less than 5 percent, while Celeron single-core 400 series 65nm had some 65 percent.

Dual-core Celeron holds some 23 percent of this market in Q1 2009, while Atom dual-core 300 series has some 7 percent of the market.

In Q2 2009 Atom 300 series dual-core will jump to more than 25 percent of this market, at the expense of Intel Celeron single-core 400 series 65nm than will drop to less than 50 percent.

In Q3, Celeron single core 65nm 400 series will further drop to some 21 percent, while in Q4 2009 its market share will shrink to some 18 to 19 percent of this market. So despite what Intel is saying, Atom is not creating a new desktop market niche, it is, in fact, eating Celeron’s market share. Of course, these numbers are Intel’s hopes, plans and predictions for quarters to come.