Teeny transistors mean that "all the complicated work you do on a circuit board can now occur in a chip," says one analyst. "That will make handheld devices smaller."
It seems obvious today that any chip would be a slam dunk if it improves battery performance while offering the full mobile Internet. But at Intel, the decision to develop the Atom was controversial. It's much easier to improve an existing product line, after all, than to create a new chip from scratch, and in 2004, when the project began, the handheld market was just emerging. The Atom would siphon billions of dollars in development costs from other programs and require hundreds of engineers working full time for four years.
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