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Comment: Why Atom may bomb?
SAN JOSE, Calif. — There's no place quite like Taipei for mobile mania, the city where mopeds are the vehicle of choice. So it's no surprise Intel's Atom and its rivals from Nvidia, Via and others are gathering there at Computex to pop a few wheelies about new kinds of mobile product concepts.
These days, Intel loves to egg on this mobile mania with its 2W+ Atom. But make no mistake about its agenda.
The world's biggest (and most narrowly focused) semiconductor maker is hungry for growth. Desktops have peaked, servers are humming along at a moderate pace and only notebooks are really growing at a lively pace.
So the x86 giant wants to generate a little excitement about whole new categories of products its marketing managers dream up in their spare time. These days, Intel is generating names faster than they can come up with rational definitions for them: net-tops, net-books, ultramobile PCs, mobile Internet devices.
What's next? Nanotops? Subtopbooks?
Taipei has always been high on such visions from the smoke-and-mirrors department in Santa Clara. When I first traveled to the island nation for Computex around 1990, it was the year of the Palmtop PC, little clamshell devices with Chicklet keyboards, black-and-white LCDs and dumbed-down versions of Windows (a term potentially redundant as military intelligence).
We were so excited about Palmtop PCs. Every self-respecting ODM in Taiwan had a prototype palmtop at their booth that year. Every Computex attendee in 1990 wanted to be the first to buy one. Within a year the whole category was dead.
At best the devices slipped into your pocket with all the grace of a grapefruit. They were nearly as useful.
Scroll ahead nearly 20 years and see what little we have learned. The Taiwan industry is still as gullible--or I should say as hungry--for a new system concept that promises something better than a single-digit profit.
Ah, but that is not the mobile Internet device. Nor is it the net-top, net-book or nex-gen mobo-mumbo-jumbo. These are systems, quoth Intel, that will bring the next billion users to the Internet because they will be cheap. Certainly less than $300, probably less than $200.
After all, the only expensive item in the nano-mobo box is the Intel processor. Everything else can be a commodity, right? Such is the vision of mobile computing from Santa Clara.
Now everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Seeing its future in this zero billion dollar market, Nvidia has rolled out its Tegra, a smaller, lower power alternative to Atom that is just as potent—and just as expensive. Via has a Nano CPU that was awarded a Best of Computex prize as the CPU from the Taiwanese homeland. Even normally sober Broadcom came to Taipei talking nonsense about media codecs for MIDs and UMPCs.
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