IDF Shanghai 2008: Atom-Enabled Devices To Debut

03:35 | Jason Lopez | Mar 17th, 2008 5:00am |

A new processor for the ultra-mobile market is Intel’s latest move to revolutionize mobility computing, from UMPCs to mobile Internet devices and even notebooks and desktops (er, “netbooks” and “net-tops”). While Atom (née Silverthorne) received its brand-new brand name recently, the family of tiny processors, which relies on 45nm technology just like the Penryn line of Core 2 Duo processors, will debut in devices on display at IDF in Shanghai in early April.

It’s no secret that China has come a long way in a short time — from being a country known for manufacturing cheap products for export to being, potentially, the next great IT superpower. National Science Board figures show that in 1994 there were only seven U.S. companies doing research in China. Ten years later, that number had risen to more than 500. Gartner analysts James Popkin and Partha Iyengar wrote, in their 2007 book I.T. and the East, that the world “will witness the birth of a real IT superpower if government restrictions are loosened and the Chinese instinctive talent for entrepreneurialism continues to be encouraged.”

It’s against this backdrop that the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, April 2 and 3, 2008, takes ...