Intel Was Slow to Embrace Low-power Chips, Exec Says

Intel engineers first began toying with a low-power microprocessor almost a decade ago, but their initial design was rejected by the company's top executives and the effort stalled soon after, an Intel executive said on Wednesday.

The initial concept behind Atom, Intel's new family of low-power chips for mobile devices, had its genesis in a research project at Intel's labs in 1999, but the idea was not "received enthusiastically" by Intel's senior staff, said Justin Rattner [CQ], Intel's chief technology officer, during a speech at Intel's "research day" in Santa Clara, California.

Read more...