When Intel announced their Atom CPU, they envisioned it wouldn’t just power computers, but would also be dropped into a cornucopia of smart devices. I’ve been wondering when we would see that happen. Looks like I didn’t have to wait too long. This morning I noticed Windows for Devices point out that Matrox Imaging has adopted a 1.6GHz Atom CPU for their Iris GT smart camera. Interestingly, the device runs WindowsCE 6.0, which has me wondering if we’ll see Intel Atom-powered Windows Mobile devices in the not too distant future. That would be interesting since that market has generally stagnated at 624MHz on the XScale side for a few years now.

The Iris GT looks more like a manufacturing-environment solution to me, but it shows how versatile Atom could be in the consumer market, and not just with traditional computing devices.