Anand Chandrasekher, Intel’s senior VP of the Ultra Mobility Group, took time out from his schedule to get very excited about the firm’s “Atom” microprocessor, and in the process told us some interesting things about how the idea came into being.

Chandrasekher said that the cut down processor, the Atom, was four years in the making and was formed on a number of assumptions which, as it turned out, were the right ones.  The genesis of the Atom, in other words, came about at the same time as the Centrino hatched.

One assumption, said Chandrasekher, was that wireless would go broadband, that that would lead to a situation where cheap corporate devices would be connected.  The Atom, he said, was a “clean sheet design”. As it’s turned out small netbooks and devices from Asus and Acer have really given a boost to the concept this year. Chandrasekher estimates that by 2012 MIDs, which is the acronym given to such devices, would amount to between 400-500 million units.

The whole sector will include such devices as Smartphones – a category which Chandrasekher claimed Intel invented – as a happy collaboration between Taiwanese firm HTC and Chipzilla’s Manitoba chip. We will see little mobile devices that will let your kids play MMORGs using broadband WiMAX as the connection medium, and will also give rise to a whole family of very portable devices inclding entertainment players and personal gaming players.

Chandrasekher even had some prototypes to show us – unfortunately we have no snaps of these creatures, but they were very pretty and presumably will be priced at such a level that the gizmo hungry won’t have to bankrupt themselves to buy them. Intel already has plans for future versions of Atoms.

Moorestown, for example, is Intel's second generation MID platform which includes Langwell, will include a system on a chip called Lincroft, integrating a 45 nanometre Atom CPU, graphics, memory controller and video controller as well as an IO hub called Langwell, with a range of IO ports for wireless and storage components. .

We asked Chandrasekher about the decision to liberate Xscale to Marvell, and the noises Marvell makes about the kind of functionality it is able to get out of developing this ARM based technology. Chandrasekher said liberating Xscale from Intel was a planned move. We understand the Xscale is still being fabbed up by the Intel Corporation, in the fab that’s attached to the Robert Noyce Building (RBN) down there in Satan Clara, but Intel denies this and says that's not so.

Chandrasekher sees a time in the future when the functionality and connectivity of Atom derivatives is such that they’ll be built into clipboards, into point of sales systems everywhere, and even be used to regulate displays.

We asked him about design wins and he said that Intel was in serious discussions with a number of manufacturers of mobile handsets who were very interested in the Atom and its potential. The overriding reason for that appears to be that it has X86 functionality, so integration and user interfaces are far easier to sort out. X