Posted on Friday, February 26 2010 @ 15:01 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Last year Intel and TSMC made a deal that would allow the latter to produce system-on-chips (SoCs) based on the Atom core, but the project has been put in the freezer due to lack of demand from potential clients.
“I think we had a lot of key learnings from the partnership so far. We haven’t given up. These things never happen superfast,” said Robert Crooke, Intel’s Atom chief, in an interview with the New York Times.
Intel and TSMC agreed to jointly create custom SoCs powered by Atom processing cores because Intel felt need to compete against custom SoCs based on ARM cores that dominate the market of consumer electronics. However, Intel failed to make potential customers interested in x86 in general and Atom in particular due to a number of reasons. If the actual performance between modern ARM and Atom cores is comparable and it is easier to integrate the ARM one, why migrate to Intel, especially if the whole product stack is ARM-based?
Source: X-bit Labs
