Atoms, Bits & Design

Every Intel CEO makes at least one big bet, he tells me, and his was on the Atom mobile chip. Otellini had to sell engineers on the notion that processor speed and PC products weren’t going to be their only claim to fame — that convenience and ease of use in a wide variety of devices is also a goal. His quest was what he calls a new “use model” for computing. The poster child became the netbook, a product category that was spawned inside Intel and, even in the teeth of the economic downturn, grew sevenfold year-over-year in the first quarter of 2009. Intel came up with the term “netbook,” and, according to Maloney, invested hundreds of people and thousands of hours teaching retailers what netbooks were and how to sell them. “What we’ve learned is that new category creation is the single most difficult thing in high tech,” Maloney says, sounding every bit the carpet dweller. As his team labored over what to call the new gizmo, some engineers remained skeptical. “I suggested ‘chickbook,’ ” smirks Mooly Eden, the techie who led the Centrino chip team. When I tell Otellini, he bursts out laughing: “That was not a name that made it to me.” He can afford a chuckle because the Atom has done far more for Intel than just launch the netbook. It has turned into an ideal product to go inside anything that wants to talk to the Web — from smartphones to MRI machines to vehicle navigation systems to cash registers. Today, some 90% of ATMs contain the chip. “Atom opened up a whole new set of things because it creates mobility,” explains Doug Davis, vice president of Intel’s embedded computing group. Companies looking to adapt the Atom to their needs even began contacting Intel salespeople asking for help. “It would never have occurred to us that a sewing machine would need the Internet,” Davis says, referring to what his team learned from purveyors of industrial machines that download specialty patterns and logos. “There’s even an Atom chip in a tractor.” Soon, a collaborative system evolved into an open platform, built around the Atom, that’s reminiscent of the Facebook developer network: a Web site where customers can get support, product information, and access to motherboards that third-party vendors are building. “We now have 1,500 new ‘design engagements,’ ” says Davis, of the new product lines in the works. “This is unprecedented.”