James Kendrick ponders what the mobile PC marketplace will look like once Intel’s Atom processor hits the streets. I’m guessing it will enable many new platforms, primarily because of its size, lower power consumption, and cost. Where I have my concerns is on the performance side. James wonders the same thing. Will it be faster? Or fast enough? Or will performance take a hit.
I’m hoping that performance will not suffer, but I can fully see how from an engineering perspective we might see incremental improvements here rather than the performance we’d really like to see all at once.
I imagine we won’t know how it’ll all pan out until the Atom starts shipping and MIDs and the like start using them. Can’t wait. My credit card is already warming up to the idea of getting one…or two.
Update: UMPCPortal reprints some graphical details on the expected performance of the Atom processor. From this charts it looks quite promising. We’ll have to see how it all pans out in the real world.