That's the point. Early Atom wasn't designed with care but the newer E-cores are quite efficient because they put more effort in.

The PMICs were also bad, plus the whole Windows software stack - to this day - is nowhere nearly as well optimized for low background and sleep power usage as MacOS and iOS are.

I have tried one before. And surprisingly, It did not suck as most people claimed to be. I can even do light gaming (warframe) on it with reasonable frame rate. (It's about 2015 ~ 2020 era). So it probably depends on manufacturer (or use case though)

You mean Atom tablets running Android ?

I have a ten-year old Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8" Windows tablet, which I still use at least once every week. It is still useful. Who can say that they are still using a ten-year old Android tablet?

I still use my 2015 Kindle Fire (which runs Android) for ebooks and light web browsing.

My iPad Mini 4 turns 10 in a month.

Yeah, I got to say in our sound company inventory I still use a dozen 6-10 year old iPads with all the mixers. They run the apps at 30fps and still hold a charge all day.

I had an Atom-based Android phone (Razr-i) and it was fine.

They sucked because Intel didn't care.

Were they running windows or android?

> how they sucked

Care to elaborate. I had the 9" mini laptop kind of device based on Atom and don't remember Atom to be the issue.

I had a Atom-based netbook (in the early days when they were 32-bit-only and couldn’t run up-to-date Windows). It didn’t suck, as such, but it was definitely resource-starved.

However, what I meant is Atom-based Android tablets. At about the same time as the netbook craze (late 2000s to early 2010s) there was a non-negligible number of Android tablets, and a noticeable fraction of them was not ARM- but Atom-based. (The x86 target in the Android SDK wasn’t only there to support emulators, originally.) Yet that stopped pretty quickly, and my impression is that that happened because, while Intel would certainly have liked to hitch itself to the Android train, they just couldn’t get Atoms fast enough at equivalent power levels (either at all or quickly enough). Could have been something else, e.g. perhaps they didn’t have the expertise to build SoCs with radios?

Either way, it’s not that Intel didn’t want to get into consumer mobile devices, it’s that they tried and did not succeed.

Android x86 devices suffer when developers include binary libraries and don't add x86. At the time of Intel's x86 for Android push, Google didn't have good apk thinning options, so app developers had to decide if they wanted to add x86 libraries for everyone so that a handful of tablets/phones would work properly... for the most part, many developers said no; even though many/most apps are tested on the android emulator that runs on x86 and probably have binary libraries available to work in that case.

IMHO, If Intel had done another year or two of trying, it probably would have worked, but they gave up. They also canceled x86 for phone like the day before the Windows Mobile Continuum demo, which would have been a potentially much more compelling product with x86, especially if Microsoft allowed running win32 apps (which they probably wouldn't, but the potential would be interesting)

Atom used an in-order execution model so it's performance was always going to be lacking. Because it was in-order it had a much simpler decoder and much smaller die size, which meant you could crap the chipset and CPU on a single die.

Atom wasn't about power efficiency or performance, it was about cost optimization.

It got a lot better. First few generations were dog-slow, although they did work.

Eeepc was was a hit. Its successors still make excellent cheap long-life laptops, if not as performant as Apple.

What year? I remember Linux gaining some traction in the low end mobile device market early on because Micrsoft just released Vista and that wouldn't even run well on most Vista Ready desktop systems.

IIRC Intel hobbled early Atom with an ancient process node for the chipsets which actually made up most of the idle power usage. It was pretty clear that both Microsoft and Intel wanted this product category to go away or at least be totally relegated to bottom tier lest it cannibalize their higher margin businesses. And then of course Apple and Android came along and did just that anyway.