Intel to Reveal Next-Gen Atom Details

Intel has something new up its sleeve for Atom. The chip giant will be revealing details about its next-generation Atom microarchitecture for the first time Monday, promising that "everything you know about Atom is about to change."

Atom has evolved considerably since Intel first introduced the low-voltage chips as a new product line in the first half of 2008. Geared towards netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), the first generation of Atom processors (Diamondville and Silverthorne) were single-core, 45-nanometer CPUs—though Intel added a dual-core Atom to the Diamondville lineup later in 2008.

While it was branded as a new product line, Atom wasn't actually built from the ground up before its debut. Intel based the 45nm generation on its existing 90nm A100 and A110 low-power microprocessors, but used Atom to target two product categories on the upswing at the time.

Netbooks certainly had their time in the sun, doing very well for a couple years before fading in the face of thinner and lighter mainstream laptops. But MIDs using x86 chips like Atom never really took off—instead, smartphones and tablets running on ARM-based chipsets exploded onto the market and left the ultra-low power version of Atom in the dust.

Intel didn't actually place Atom into a commercially available consumer smartphone until April 2012. The company's inability to compete with ARM has been a tough pill to swallow—for the first time in years, mighty Intel wasn't able to dominate an important new general-purpose computing market.

Of course, Intel hasn't been standing still with Atom since first introducing the product line. Successive generations of Atom chips have been made more power efficient and have been brought along into new fabrication processes. While Intel's flagship Core and Xeon products have been the first to move to new manufacturing processes like 22nm, the company has said it is tightening the pace at which Atom goes to new process nodes.

Intel has tweaked Atom for embedded system implementations and has even positioned a new 64-bit edition of Atom for the server market.

The company has also steadily added System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capabilities to its Atom Z-series products in an attempt to better compete with ARM, while also opening Atom up to Google's Android mobile operating system. The latest wrinkle in that game has been the addition of a low-power, multimode-multiband 4G LTE global modem, the Intel XMM 7160, to current and future Atom SoCs.

Adding radio and modem capabilities to Atom finally gives Intel a product that can legitimately compete with ARM-based mobile device SoCs from Qualcomm, Samsung, and others.

So what should we expect to see from Intel today? I'm guessing at least part of the reveal is going to show a next-gen microarchitecture that fits the modem into the same package as the application processor—potentially giving Intel an Atom SoC that mobile device makers simply won't be able to ignore.

Might we also see a stricter delineation between Atoms for client devices and Atoms for back-end systems—possibly even new branding for the latter product line?

PCMag will be attending Intel's big Atom event beginning at 12 p.m. Eastern and will fill you in with the news as soon as we get it.