The Atom is Intel's weakest chip. It is designed for super-low power consumption, which means that they cost very little money to run. (so usually, data-centers like running them, because they don't use much electricity. Naturally, the savings are typically passed onto the consumer).
The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad. It is still fully x86 compatible, its just slow. Roughly... the speed of a Pentium 4 or so.
Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only, which means 4GB maximum RAM (not an issue for smaller webservers with only 2GB).
Atoms tend to be best for I/O limited tasks. If you do video streaming for instance, the vast majority of your CPU power is going to be "wasted" on waiting for the Hard Drives and the Network. So the Atom makes a good, cheap CPU for that kind of task.
For tasks with tons of computations, (ie: game servers), the Atom is woefully inadequate.
> The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad
The Atom came out in 2008, two years before the iPad, and come from a lineage started in 2003. It was designed for the now dead netbook category that required low power consumption.
64-bit versions have been available since 2010, both versions used by OVH are x86-64. There are also server-specific versions with support for ECC memory, though they doesn't seem to be using them.
iPad's CPU/GPU uses ~5W of power. These Atoms use ~8W of power.
Regardless of the 'ordering', the Atom line of processors are designed for the <10W form factor. True, Atoms existed before the iPad, but they are in fact designed to compete in that power-range. The analogy works very well: the iPad 4th generation A6x processor is just slightly slower than the newest Clovertrail Atoms. The older Atoms (like the 330) probably are a bit slower than an iPad.
So yes, perhaps I misspoke earlier. Nonetheless, I stand behind the analogy. Intel Atoms are Intel's version of the iPad A6x. They use roughly the same power and give roughly the same performance... but Atoms give you full x86 compatibility.
Perhaps a more appropriate way to say it... is that the Atom is designed to be a competitor to low-power ARM chips in general. Intel is making strides in making extremely slow, but power efficient chips. And in Performance/Watt, they're roughly on the same scale.
Yes, meaning they were made to compete with ARM makes more sense, not the ipad (non-existent att) specifically. It was Intel's bet on mobile. The cortex processors used in the iOS line have only caught up recently regarding performance.
The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks. That was seen as the probable breakout market, though it was short-lived.
So Intel wanted a fairly power efficient chip, but they also wanted to ensure that it didn't cannibalize their own sales, so they intentionally crippled it from a performance perspective, not least by always building it on the last or second-last process. This is an aspect of the Atom that is missed by so many, sure that Intel was caught with their pants down by ARM: Intel's biggest fear wasn't ARM, but that their pricey high-end CPUs would get replaced by their low cost variants. They still fight with this paranoia to this day.
The Atom was neither inspired by the iPad (obviously given that it far preceded it) or even ARM. At best you could say Intel had some concern about Transmeta, leading to some of the early Atom work.
This isn't a minor error of "ordering". These were critical mistakes in your retelling of history.
I'm well aware of that fact, and I am also aware of the fact that BayTrail Atoms are correcting this mistake. (Finally, 22nm Atoms for realz this time.)
I have admitted my mistake with an addendum, although I cannot edit my earlier post anymore. What more do you want?
> The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks.
This is incorrect. The Atom CPU was initially meant for smartphones, but the first models way overshooted the available power envelope. Netbooks were created by Asus when Intel offered a lot of cheap, slow chips for sale that were good for little else, and they created a new, shortlived segment. No-one at Intel thought about netbooks when designing Atom.
Didn't we already cover this? It is revisionist fiction, built around the notion that Intel was so outclassed by ARM, when really Intel was just short-sighted about how important smartphones would become.
The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor (I have a little file server running a dual-core Atom, the processor being air cooled while the chipset has a fan. As a humorous aside, altogether that micro-PC uses about the same power as my new i7 Mac Mini under standard loads), b) completely built for traditional PC uses. Do you need IDE on your smartphone, for instance? How about an A20 line?
The "glut of inventory" notion is not realistic. It doesn't work that way.
Intel had no intentions in the smartphone industry at the time. If they did, not only would they have actually made a decent chipset (they happen to be the most advanced chipmaker in the world, with the world's best fabs), they would have made a prototype (which is what all manufacturers do when they try to enter a market - a proof of concept). There were absolutely none until later Atom variants.
People forget it now, but it was initiatives like One Laptop Per Child that initiated the netbook craze -- that program talking about ultra-inexpensive laptops, leading to a lot of people saying "You know...I too would like an inexpensive laptop that I could just bang around and leave in the car and..." (Slashdot was full of people trying to repurpose such devices), and with that an industry was born.
Yup, OLPC was what "woke up" Intel, making them begin to build Atoms. Frankly, Intel had the foresight to start the Atom project to hedge their bets a little bit.
They never "really" tried to compete in the smartphone market (which is ~2W), the Atom was instead always targeted at ~10W. (IIRC, Intel's real focus at that time were Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage, CULV processors at the 18W envelope. Today... known as Ultrabooks). However, as Smartphones became the next hot thing, it is now obvious that Intel has to scale the Atom down even further. And unfortunately, the netbook market imploded.
Its not all wasted however, IMO, netbooks "became" tablets. From a CPU perspective, there is little difference between Netbooks and Tablets. You want low-power consumption between 5W to 10W, and lower costs. In fact, as netbooks were "dying out", they slowly became tablets. See AsusTab Smart for example, it basically is a Netbook without a keyboard, but built with a touchscreen. (same price range as Netbooks of old, but just in tablet form).
Anyway, Intel hasn't forgotten the Smartphone market either. Thus the Atoms that worked closer to the 2W SoC benchmark... Medfield, Clovertrail, and soon to be Bay Trail Atoms. Clovertrail is winning a few benchmarks here and there, and Bay Trail will be built on Intel's latest process for once. So it looks like Intel is finally taking the smartphone market seriously. But only the last generation or so are actual attempts at a Smartphone chip... and even then, there isn't a single Atom out there that is built on Intel's latest 22nm process. That will only come from the future Bay Trail Atoms.
> The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor
To add some numbers:
The most popular first generation Atom, the N270, had a TDP of 2.5 W. The accompanying chipset and I/O controllers however had a combined TDP of 9.3 W.
Some lines of Atoms since mid-2010 or so have supported x86_64. The Sxxxx "server" atoms released at the end of 2012 are all 64-bit-enabled, for example, although they can still only take 8GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265
I agree that this is mainly interesting if you're I/O-limited. Most benchmarks show a "regular" recent-gen Intel CPU performing around 5x-10x the Atom, so if you're CPU-limited, even a low-end VPS that gives you an average of 1/4 share of a core will probably outperform sole tenancy on an Atom core. But a high-contention VPS in most cases will give you much worse I/O performance. Also, the storage space and bandwidth quota here are much better than with a comparably priced VPS.
Thanks for pointing that out. It seems odd to me that a system that only supports single-channel DDR2 RAM would be 64-bit however. With so little RAM, the benefits of 64-bit computing are basically void.
Yeah, that's an issue with conservative garbage collectors. When memory actually in use is a large fraction of the address space, then random values can look like pointers too often. When valid_memory << address_space, on the other hand, most non-pointer values won't alias a valid pointer.
The specific issue with Go was significantly mitigated in Go 1.1 by making much more of the GC precise rather than conservative. Here's a comment from about a month ago on the current state: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909#c59
The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad. It is still fully x86 compatible, its just slow. Roughly... the speed of a Pentium 4 or so.
Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only, which means 4GB maximum RAM (not an issue for smaller webservers with only 2GB).
Atoms tend to be best for I/O limited tasks. If you do video streaming for instance, the vast majority of your CPU power is going to be "wasted" on waiting for the Hard Drives and the Network. So the Atom makes a good, cheap CPU for that kind of task.
For tasks with tons of computations, (ie: game servers), the Atom is woefully inadequate.
You can purchase an Atom computer for ~$165: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-ZID60-U. So play around with the performance yourself, and see if its enough.