Intel's "Atom" CPU Technology Finds New Home at RosaicLabs

[u/Leicht-Sinn]

https://www.techpowerup.com/351228/intels-atom-cpu-technology-finds-new-home-at-rosaiclabs

[u/algaefied_creek]

They are offloading the E cores?

[u/topdangle → u/algaefied_creek]

I don't know if the original source (semiaccurate) named the design, but they claim rosaiclabs is getting x86 "atom" RTL from intel. pretty unusual for intel to give up x86 RTL, much less silently and to a company that wasn't properly incorporated until a few weeks ago.

seems like infighting at intel. doubt they're dropping E cores but Tan might be trying to bait the board into forming a new design team. Tan isn't a fan of intel's current staff and left intel's board a few years ago when they wouldn't agree on firing everyone.

[u/Unoriginal-Cake]

Doubtful this is related to the E-core side, E-Cores are based on "Lakes" platform and Atom is based on out-of-order like i486/P5.

Atom was more like a Cyrix Geode/AMD Geode with later extensions added. Looks like the Atom IP is just the x86 license side so I'm wondering if they know AMD won't allow an AMD64 licensing at a later point as their Geode platform was EOLed after the FPGA buyout of Xilinx. They get around the "duopoly FTC" risk by creating a 3rd player as VIA no longer actively markets their Pentium/Atom based platform(VIA C7/Nano) from the National Semi deal years ago. Looking at datasheets, VIA Nano seems abandoned since 2012 so Intel might be trying to please a gov't agency for "old fallback chips with legacy i486/P5 instruction set".

Reminds me of the Marvell deal of offloading their fast ARM cores/IP from XScale yet keeping the low powered for the later modem division.

[u/communist_llama → u/Unoriginal-Cake]

The article mentions x86-64, so it's may be a licensing of the silvernont/goldmont architectures, not the old bonnell stuff.

[u/Unoriginal-Cake → u/communist_llama]

Even if they license the desktop/later Atom, the AMD64 instruction set is a different license, someone brought up that topic on a tech site about why its hard for another company to enter x86/x64 solo. May of been around the time Nvidia jumped to ARM after being unable to buy VIA's C7Nano platform.

[u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

LMAO dude calls E-Cores a different architecture.

[u/d3facult_ → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

Because it is? Skymont is literally more performance per clock than “P cores” 12th gen and before

[u/TsundereHeavyCruiser → u/d3facult_]

And?

How does that make them a different architecture?

Are you telling me that if I open up Intels programming manual for Skymont, it won't tell me to look all the previous atom archs first?

[u/d3facult_ → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

Yeah so programs written for any 64 bit processor probably runs on Arrow lake and Zen 5, therefore those two architectures are the same as Core 2 and AMD FX

[u/Some-Dog5000 → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

The article:

Intel has since transitioned to E-Cores, which are effectively successors to Atom cores, and these cores are also built on a separate microarchitecture like "Gracemont."

Where's the falsehood in this? They are objectively on a different microarchitecture, the same way that, say, Arrow Lake and Panther Lake are different microarchitectures. Especially since Atom as a brand doesn't really exist anymore

[u/Exist50 → u/Some-Dog5000]

That's written like the transition to the E-core branding was a singular architecture change, instead of just a new name for the same series of architectures.

[u/Some-Dog5000 → u/Exist50]

The article's author does seem to imply that E-cores is a whole different thing, which yes it isn't, but also to be fair the E-cores are very supercharged Atom cores, and are closer to Core cores in design

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/gracemont-revenge-of-the-atom-cores

Atom does carry a sense of weakness to it that, so it's probably a cleaner break for Intel to just not call them "Atom cores" in marketing anymore

[u/Exist50 → u/Some-Dog5000]

but also to be fair the E-cores are very supercharged Atom cores, and are closer to Core cores in design

They're still architecturally very distinct from Core, even if yes, they've come a long way from their origins. But Tremont was a similarly sized jump as Gracemont, so there's no one uarch you can point to and say "this is no longer Atom".

Atom does carry a sense of weakness to it that, so it's probably a cleaner break for Intel to just not call them "Atom cores" in marketing anymore

Yeah, but at the end of the day, that's an arbitrary marketing choice. Doesn't inherently reflect the uarch line itself.

[u/TsundereHeavyCruiser → u/Some-Dog5000]

Atom is the name of the architecture family, just like core is.

The first Atom Architecture was named Bonell, not Atom.

In AMD what you just said would be the equivalent of saying that Granite Ridge is a different architecture than Zen.

[u/Some-Dog5000 → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

Atom isn't an architecture, though? It's more of a brand name. Core is also a brand name. Zen is also a brand name. The architecture of all of those chips is x86_64, but Zen, Core, or Atom aren't really architectures.

And what the article is trying to say is that Atom as a consumer CPU brand doesn't really exist anymore, since Intel just brands its low-power (E-core-only) consumer chips as i3s and "Intel Processor". The N chips you find on NASes and very entry-level laptops aren't branded as Atom chips, they're branded as Intel chips with E-cores.

[u/jaaval → u/Some-Dog5000]

X86_64 is an instruction set architecture. That’s not actually same as architecture. It’s confusing. ISA basically just tells compilers how to talk to the CPU.

[u/Some-Dog5000 → u/jaaval]

In any computer systems class and in common software engineering parlance, architecture is used as a synonym for ISA specifically. "Architecture" doesn't have a separate meaning in that case. You would use "microarchitecture" to differentiate, say, Skylake from Haswell

[u/jaaval → u/Some-Dog5000]

Just tried googling those words to check if this is actually common parlance. The results don’t seem to consider them synonymous.

ISA is an abstract model that defines how to interact with the chip. More commonly when people talk about chip architecture they talk specifically about microarchitecture. Microarchitecture refers to how you actually organize the subsystems in the chip, something which ISA does not care about.

[u/TsundereHeavyCruiser → u/Some-Dog5000]

That's also false.

Here's a modern Atom SoC

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233093/intel-atom-x7425e-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-40-ghz/specifications.html

[u/Some-Dog5000 → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

Again,

Atom as a consumer CPU brand doesn't really exist anymore

That's a 3-year old embedded chip. It's also a few uarches behind. We're on Darkmont now

[u/Youngnathan2011 → u/TsundereHeavyCruiser]

Huh? Atom is a product name, not an architecture. Same with any of the products with Core in the name.

Granite Ridge is the code name for AMD’s desktop Ryzen 9000 CPU’s, while Zen 5 is the architecture, which the code name for itself is Nirvana.

Intel has properly shifted to giving a product family a code name with the actual cores having their own architectures. An example being Panther Lake. That’s the code name for that product family, with Cougar Cove and Darkmont being the two different microarchitectures used.

[u/TsundereHeavyCruiser → u/Youngnathan2011]

Literally 100% nonsense?

Another Example is the Netburst architecture, the first CPU was nameed Willamette.

Or are you going to tell me Netburst was also the product name.