In an effort to coax developers to begin taking Atom seriously as an Android platform, Intel has just released a complete suite of tools that should help ease them into things - especially since it can be used for ARM development as well. It's called Beacon Mountain, named after the highest peak outside of Beacon, New York, and it currently targets Windows 7 and 8 as the development host OS, with Mac OS X to be supported later this year.

As you'd expect, Beacon Mountain supports Jelly Bean (4.2) development, and with this suite, you're provided with a collection of important Intel tools: Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager, Integrated Performance Primitives, Graphics and System Performance Analyzers, Threaded Building Blocks and Software Manager. In addition, Android SDK and NDK, Eclipse and Cygwin third-party tools are included to complete the package.

To help explain the suite a bit, Intel has released the following video:

If Beacon Mountain supported only Intel platforms, its appeal would be questionable. But with it also offering support for ARM, it could do well to drag some developers in. And I hope so, because it'd be great to see Intel become a major competitor in this area. Competition is very good.