It has been a long, long time since Intel have been challenged for their number one ranking in the chip making world. From the time of the first Pentium processors, to the dual-core and quad-core present, the chipmaker has always been seemingly ahead of the competition.
Now, Intel has another product that just continues its long-time dominance over its rivals: the Intel Atom. The introduction of the Atom was brought about by the sudden popularity of netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC and the MSI Wind. These low-cost, ultra-portable laptops needed a relatively cheap processor that provided decent computing power. The Atom was the answer.
Almost all new netbooks from manufacturers such as Asus, MSI, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba use the Atom N270 CPU. The Atom N270 is a 1.6 Ghz CPU that uses Hyper-Threading technology. Intel has announced a replacement for the current N270 that shall be released sometime in 2009. For now though, the Atom N270 trumps all of the competition in the low-cost CPU game.
No surprise there as it just continues Intel’s dominance in the chip making game. It’s now up to other chipmakers such as VIA and AMD to up their game to try to beat Intel.