The assembled hacks pressed Adiletta for more details about the Atom S Series roadmap, and this hack in particular asked about the way that Intel would embed interconnects onto the chip as Calxeda has done with its EnergyCore EXC-1000 processors or Applied Micro Circuits has done with its X-Gene chips.As far as Calxeda is concerned, putting ARM cores and a distributed Layer 2 switch that scales to 4,096 nodes today and to over 100,000 nodes in a few years is the real engineering task with microservers – not welding an Ethernet NIC to an Atom processor. After having bought Ethernet chip maker Fulcrum Microsystems a few years back, Intel certainly could respond with something similar, but Adiletta was not there to provide an actual roadmap, but rather to establish Intel's cred in microservers and ramp up excitement for the Atom S Series."This has been a classic question from the communications space for a long time: do you go distributed or do you do centralized," explained Adiletta when asked about integrated networking on the future Atoms.

"Quite frankly," he said, "if you talk to comms folks, it is a religious argument. If you do centralized, then one of the nice things is how you can manage it and hop counts. Latency is interesting. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. I wish I could go into some real technical details on this, but frankly I am quite bullish on what our approach is going to be."That wasn't a real answer, and Adiletta would have been taken out behind the Intel PR woodshed if he actually did answer the question. But what seems clear is that Intel is going to put Ethernet ports onto the future "Avoton" Atom S Series chips due in 2013, and will rely on its foundry advantages and tweaks to the Atom core (moving from in-order to out-of-order processing was one such change that Adiletta hinted at) to drive thermals down and performance up, and then haul out the old x86 compatibility saw that it's also using to help promote its Xeon Phi parallel x86 coprocessors in supercomputing.What Intel should probably do is embed an Atom S chip on a Xeon Phi, use the PCI slot for power only, slap an InfiniBand port on it, stick a boatload of SATA or SAS ports on it for hard disks or SSDs, and throw away the Xeon node for all but the most serious single-threaded work where a brawny core is required. (We are only half joking here.)

"There is a lot of performance that we could gain by adding sophistication to our Atom cores," Adiletta said. "I like where we are. We have the right tools in the toolbox and the management support to go out and do this."Later in the Q&A session, Adiletta said that the future Atoms would "show very, very good low-power idle power metrics," which of course is something that ARM chips can already boast. And looking at thelow power states in Intel's future "Haswell" microarchitecture, you can be forgiven for thinking that Intel might be tempted to do away with Atoms altogether and just stick with Xeons in the next few years.For all we know, the lack of serious attention to Atom-based servers up until fairly recently could be another reason why CEO Paul Otellini is retiring next May. Perhaps Otellini wants some young blood to handle the shift that will turn the Atom into the new Xeon and the Xeon into the new Itanium, at least in hyperscale data centers and for more workloads as more and more software gets parallelized.

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Remember, after all, that it took the Core architecture to be spun up into a Xeon in Opteron drag to vanquish AMD, and it might take an Atom phone and netbook processor wrapped in Xeon drag to repel the onslaught of the ARMed rebels. Analysis Unless Microsoft gives Windows Phone some urgent attention, all of its hard work will go up in smoke and take Europe's largest technology company with it.We've now seen Windows Phone 8 running on four strong handsets - two each from Nokia and HTC - and it's fair to say the manufacturers have kept their side of the bargain. HTC wins on design, Nokia on build quality and software features, and Nokia can boast one genuine unique selling point: the Lumia 920's camera that no other phone can match. But has Microsoft kept its side of the deal?Nokia burned its old phone platforms because Microsoft promised a more vibrant app ecosystem. But almost two years later, it's still not there.

This won't be easy reading for Microsoft; its engineers have moved the operating system to a new kernel, Windows Phone 8 is pretty good at running older phone software, and the company has built a solid and reliable base. This is far from fatal.Now with Windows 8 chief Sinofsky gone, Microsoft can now refocus on the importance of its phone platform. After esoteric adventures such as the development of the Surface laptop-cum-tablet - like Caligula planning to make his horse a consul: "a combination of all the gods and to be worshipped as one" - focus is what Microsoft needs.Stop fretting about tablets. You can fix Windows 8 by making the new touchscreen-driven Metro user interface optional on desktops and laptops that aren't primarily touch devices - just tweak it, so it's no longer so much in your face. People will keep buying Windows for PCs and they'll be glad of the changes you made. Windows Phone should now be priority number one, two and three at Microsoft. It needs to be in this race in two years.

There are several issues with Windows Phone today that are hard to overlook. One is the state of the platform's online software store Marketplace. In comparison with Apple's and Google's outlets, it looks worse, if anything, than a year ago. It reflects inertia rather than momentum.A depressing number of apps haven't been updated in months. There's no tumult of new WP8-capable programs. And some major applications, for example Spotify, that were present a year ago are not there today.This may reflect the lateness of the Windows Phone 8 software development kit, which means developers haven't yet had a chance to rewrite their applications for the new and much more capable platform. Or it may reflect the fact programmers have far more lucrative markets to target besides Windows Phones: iOS and Android are already very competitive marketplaces, so any time spent coding for a third platform is very hard to justify.Rather ominously the unified realm of Windows 8 that was promised hasn't materialised: Windows 8 smartphone apps won't run on Windows 8 desktops; a Windows 8 Metro PC app will require a different code base to run as a Windows 8 Metro mobile app, as Tim Anderson pointed out here. Microsoft retains the Silverlight-based XAML runtime in Win 8 or the cupboard would look very bare indeed. Developers may well be beavering away writing native code for WP8, but if they are, it's going to take a while to make a difference.

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As we've mentioned in previous articles, Windows Phone 8 doesn't reflect a year's worth of user-land improvements. In terms of renovation work the user can see, it's more of a minor feature pack. For example, there's little benefit to having DirectX and the Autocad frameworks on a phone until there are apps that can take advantage of them. The user opting for a new Windows phone will have a curious experience.On the one hand, especially if they're a heavy Facebook user, there's a vivid and imaginative handheld computing experience that's radically better than anything else on offer. They'll find they can pin friends to their home screen on tiles that aggregate their photos, social networking messaging, as well as calls, emails and texts. Facebook doesn't need to make "the perfect Facebook phone" - Microsoft has done it for them. The feedback for this is uniformly positive; it's how the iPhone should have been designed.But at the same time, users may be wondering why the music playback volume and ringtone can't be decoupled, or where Instagram is, or why Tumblr isn't supported in the People hub, or why you can't mark a tweet as favourite, nor flag an email message as important.

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