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Intel's Atom — First Benchmarks and a Full PC Review
Barence writes "PC Pro has received, benchmarked and discussed the first Intel Atom processor to be seen in the wild. A full analysis of the Atom processor itself is accompanied by a full review of the first PC — yes it's a PC, not a laptop — to use one. The benchmark results are pretty much as expected, but it's the power savings that really excite. And as a rep from the PC maker, Tranquil, joked — they could have left the Atom CPU uncooled if they'd really wanted to prove a point, as it's the old graphics chip that produces 70% of the heat coming from the motherboard. Exciting times ahead for the upcoming Atom-based Eee and friends."
MojoKid was one of several readers, too, to mention the upcoming
Eee Box mini-desktop from Asus (also Atom-based), which is supposed to start from $299, writing "although the actual dimensions are listed,
the image from ASUS' booth really gives a sense of scale. In the picture,
the Eee Box is standing next to a paperback book."
I think AMD's competitive processor should be called the 'Eve'.
That is all.
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Now if HP will get these into a thin client with an air cooled nvidia I'll be a happy person with 'tubby clients' (network booting fanless with local X session and applications)
More info and benchmarks at http://anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3321
Someone wake me up when theyâ(TM)re selling a board which has a few GigE network ports (and can really saturate them), at least 4 SATA II ports, and one PCIe Slot. I don't really want some old inefficient 3D video accelerator either.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Ok, I don't remember for sure if I have the name right, but I remember, back about 1998 or 2000, there was a company showcasing these tiny, power efficient PC's which had a form-factor somewhat similar to that Eee mini-PC in the linked image from the article. I think they used an ARM, or maybe it was Alpha, RISC processor, and came with some Linux distro.
I think the main downfall of that endeavor was that 1) the computers weren't Intel compatible, or Mac compatible, so you had to use Linux or BSD on them (and would have needed an Intel emulator on top of that to run any binaries compiled for Intel), I think, in order to keep them small and relatively cheap (they were still, I think, like 600 bucks, so kind of expensive, considering you could get generic PC's for about 400) and 3) the company that produced them was too small and simply lacked the funding necessary to survive in any case.
Still, I've always thought tiny-form factor PCs were nifty. If you could get one that was powerful enough, with decent enough video, you could use them as the basis for your own set-top boxes, routers, and things like that, or even just a small, low-power, inconspicuous server.
Anybody have any idea why Microsoft would want to limit the amount of HDD space on a machine?
Ok. You're redundant.
Looks like I paid top dollar for old tech.
All well, it still looks cool.
I've been in the market for one of these minilaptops (ultraportable, sub-notebook etc.) for a while, and it seems the market is evolving very quickly, so I should wait a few months and see what happens.
From what I understand, the Atom is designed for about 2W of power usage (under load?). This should make these computers have batteries that last forever, which will be really nice.
I like the idea of a solid state drive in laptops (resistant to drops, low power consumption, etc), but I haven't found a minilaptop that meets my needs:
1. ultra low power for a 4-6 hour battery life.
2. solid state drive (I could do this after market, if the thing meets all of my other needs)
3. 3G modem that's not a PCMCIA card (or whatever the equivalent addon bus is now)
4. preferably larger than 8", as I'm a large person myself.
5. linux compatible hardware (wireless card, mostly). I'm totally comfortable installing it myself, though.
Does anyone know of anything like this? I realize the EEE has everything but the 3G modem, and it's at the top of my list of picks right now. I'll probably wait for the Atom model and see how the battery life is with that one. However, I figure someone here knows about something that I've missed.
First, as we all know, power consumption is becoming more and more relevant. A quick google search a low-power server (meant for 24x7) draws 50 Watts, comparable to a light bulb. If we can get decent performance topping at 5 watts (leaving some margins for intel), you can save 90% of a big part of your power bill straight away. That alone predicts success for Intel, at least in the long term if we wait for the next hardware replacement cycle at the big companies.
Also, looking at the prices, you get 1.6 GHz at $95. A quick google says you can get an Intel Pentium E2200 2.2GHz LGA 775 65W Processor for $80 at NewEgg. Doing some math, you can buy 17.6 GHz for $640 (8 timse 65W) or for $1045 (11 times 5W, above figure). That's a $405 difference, and a 465 Watt saving. If you can get 9 kWh per dollar, you've earned back the $405 if you use the processors for a year (24x7).
That's what I call a business case for buying intel. Of course the case gets even better if intel hits 2.5 Watts or power is more expensive at the prospective customer's data center.
However, it seems to be aimed more at mobile use that datacenter use, so let's look at that. This groundbreaking marriage of performance and efficiency means that Atom-powered phones and PDAs could run the same applications as desktop machines, while maintaining the battery life consumers demand. Eh, well. You'd run into user interaction issues. The I/O devices on mobile platforms are not suited for desktop applications: you don't have much of a keyboard (at least not one that's comfortable to type on) and not much of a mouse. Also, with limited screen real estate, you'll run into problems like being able to fit the toolbar but not the textarea of kate onto the screen.
But the promise is not UI, the promise is horsepower. And that's something to be excited about. The first thing that springs to my mind is encrypting phone calls in real time in software without immediately draining the battery. I'm not much of a radio guy, but if Intel could up the speed over the next few years, we could potentially have software radio on our cell phones. That frigging excites me (and potentially scares the living daylight out of the FCC).
Their benchmarks (for which there were no details) showed Atom was ~10% slower than a Via C7 ???
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/03/acer_launches_one/
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So how long until these are in Lenovo's notebooks? Originally I heard these would be out in the begining of June, but I haven't heard boo.
Anyone? Bueller?
While the Atom certainly delivers impressive power statistics compared to our typical laptop processors, they are still far from the level of the ARM family. A recent article on Ars Technica will explain why. ARM processors are by far the most common processor on the low power frontier and the reason seems apparent; even at 1GHz they claim to reach operational power consumption around 300mW. Now, granted, it is on a RISC instruction set, but their upcoming Cortex-A9 will support multicore and starts to sound like a very interesting alternative for a notebook processor.
Could someone drop me a message as soon as those things start entering the market?
When someone cares about what you want.
Yep, this looks pretty good for £199, though the spec is some ways behind the MSI Wind - and there's no Bluetooth...
There are some video clips that show the Aspire One being handled and the OS in action over at Mobile Computer.
They were cool looking little boxes. I might have to buy me one someday soon (before you can't find em anymore). I think I remember they were bought up by Corel at some point? Did Corel do anything with the Netwinder? As far as I can tell, Corel is one of those companies where good products go to die.
Sorry, I mis-modded your post Redundant when I meant to hit Interesting.
I owe you a (free as in) beer.
For every machine built Intel will have to kill a little girl to pull the slug out.
Efficient graphics as in, don't add a useless chip that draws significantly more than the CPU on my server. I thought the original request was quite clear, and echoes my own sentiment.
Also, PCIe is useful for adding more NICs and I/O controllers. It isn't just for graphics cards.
[rant] Why on Earth don't they publicize watt consumption of the new system? It should be required. I realize different configs and usage patterns will result in different power consumption but there's no good reason not to provide a stat that says "with config X the system consumed __ watts at idle and ___ watts at full load."
Seriously, if everyone is going green you'd think they would want to advertise that their little box is energy efficient.
[\rant]
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
If he wants to do NAS, he may want more disk channels to saturate his multiple gigabit ethernet links... even a single SATA II 300 MB/s link requires a x2 PCIe link, or a new PCIe 2.0 speed x1 link, for example if it has a port-multiplier hanging off it with enough disks.
Hey, Intel is beating Transmeta at their own game.
You remember Transmeta. Linus worked there. Stock started out around $20/share. I bought $4000 worth. The darn thing tanked, reverse split, and tanked some more. I have about $35 worth of this company now. Yep, rode it all the way down.
But now that Intel is making a realllllly low power processor, it is big news. I hope Transmeta gets some new orders because of this.
Oh yeah, Transmeta claims about a dozen or patents have been infringed upon by Intel in the production of this chip. So we just might have a new SCO. (At least I never bought any SCO stock.)
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
How is this informative? Ok, yes, it is higher power than an ARM. However it also is more powerful (as in what it can do). You ever stop to think that maybe there is a a market for more than one kind of processor? It doesn't seem like this is aimed at the Arm market. Seems like this is aimed at a market that isn't well populated with chips. You need something that's less powerful than a normal laptop processor, but more powerful than an embedded processor. Well, here you go. This would be ideal for things like, say, a m0n0wall (which uses 486 class embedded chips right now) or a little media box.
There is a market for a whole range of power of chips. ARMs are great for ultra low power. In fact Intel had an ARM line, the Xscale (based on ARM 5 with no FP), which are extremely popular in smartphones. They still make them, for that matter, they just sold the line to Marvell recently. However I certainly wouldn't want on in my desktop.
The Atom seems to be targeted at devices that need more power than an Xscale can provide, but need power consumption less than what a Core 2 can offer.
I'm hoping that atom might be a good low power, low cost solution for a lightweight server. I hate leaving my dell on 24/7 as it's a power hog.
Atom is only here because of AMD's Geode, so Intel should be playing the copycat game.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So 235 MPG is the right figure for anyone living in your area. =)
ps. Google is your friend: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=100+km%2Fl+in+mpg
You can take a look at the power dissipation of both of the chips at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080529-via-takes-the-wraps-off-isaiah-meet-the-nano.html
They should have found or made the extra space necessary to get a laptop-sized optical drive in there (Nintendo have with the similar-sized Wii). One of those desktop Eee's with a DVD drive would be a killer client-only box for MythTV (so long as you can turn DVI-out into appropriate TV-in).
It's dinky, stylish enough to have in your living room, presumably pretty quiet, cheap, and more powerful than reusing an old box. What's not to like? (and if you get the bluetooth option, you can get One of these, or something similar but cheaper)
FGD 135
That's a rather deceptive statement. The /. summary could have just said the dimensions ( 8.5" x 7" x 1" ) rather than taking more space to say they were given in the article. But the book used is not the size of what most readers have come to know as a "paperback book". While it is not a hard cover book, it is the size of a hard cover book, known as a "trade book" in the industry, not a much smaller paperback. And unfortunately, the picture doesn't give much else in the way of a reference, so may people are likely suckered into this belief that the computer is the size of a paperback. It's still a nicely compact system, I don't dispute that, but there seems to be an effort here to mislead.
It's sad to see more and more /. "articles" just being ads for products, and it's even sadder when deceptive hype is injected and the editors don't clean it up. And I have to think this was deliberate, why else say "although the actual dimensions are listed..." when the true 8.5" x 7" x 1" would have been more more concise, more informative and less deceptive?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I wasn't really mixing up the two. In fact, somehow I hadn't noticed the DEC Multia before. I was thinking of the Netwinder, but just misremembered the name. I remember going to a Linux conference somewhere, and seeing the Netwinder's being demod. Part of me lusted after it, because it was so small and power efficient. But, ultimately, I remember looking at the price and thinking to myself I could get a pretty decent PC with significantly better specs than the netwinder (in terms of graphics, RAM, HDD) for about the same price.
I was hoping that the things would find a market, and eventually get to a more competitive price point (I also figured if the company was successful at all, that in a couple years' time there'd be better units [reasoning that in 2-3 years time, there'd likely be upgrades to the StongARM cpu, or maybe they'd just switch to some other power-efficient, cool CPU, plus they'd get more ram, maybe better integrated graphics, and larger hard drives), at about the same price or possibly slightly cheaper, that would be a more compelling value to me).
Well, anyhow, I suspect that this Eee PC from Asus will do better (Asus is an established company that, I think, can put the necessary funding into marketing, production [to drive the per-unit costs down to a compelling point], and keeping with it long enough for the product to start to succeed.
Hey, how does the Atom stack up against the Transmeta chips?
I bet an Eee-type lappy with an ARM chip or Transmeta would nuke the Intel Atom!
Yes, Microsoft definitely wants people buying Vista instead and I'm not sure the manufacturers have (or can) do much to make XP available to the masses.
... It's kind of sad. Sure you *can* buy with XP, but why would you want to?
I've been shopping for portable hardware over the last week and there are some pretty astounding price differences. Companies are allowing XP on some machines, but holy heck is it tough to make the call between expensive XP machines and cheap Vista machines!
NewEgg has only a dozen or so XP laptops in stock, all of them with at most 1GB RAM, while for the same price you get Vista with up to 3GB RAM, 2-4x hard drive size,
Well, because if you don't buy a machine with XP already on it there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find device drivers for XP for any Vista machine out there. And some of us still aren't willing to take the plunge even from XP to Vista to go a step deeper into product registration hell.
Dell is a joke on their machine configurations too - even though they've got discounts on most everything right now, an XP laptop (well, the 1520 vs Vista's 1525) is limited in CPU speed so the comparison is:
$1076: Inspiron 1525 w Vista 1680x1050(15.4") 2.4GHz 3GB RAM 250GB HD 85Whr battery
or
$1091: Inspiron 1520 w XP Pro 1680x1050(15.4") 2.0GHz 2GB RAM 120GB HD (+Intel Wireless N card)
Upgrade the RAM and replace the battery and hard drive to have almost equivalent specs (plus an extra lower-capacity battery) +50 + 169 + 100 = +319 = $1,410!
So Vista is getting a $300 discount!
It may be unrelated, but confusing that if you shop around for the Asus EEE 900 - granted the tradeoff is obvious with a 20GB SSD + Linux to match a 12GB SSD + WinXP at the same (list?) price, but some shops are still willing to charge more for the Linux distro version?!
Yuck. Makes me want to find some independant shop just to make this headache go away.
8-PP
I'm thinking at 36 Watt, the monitor is probably the largest consumer of power these days? Any idea how efficient LCD's have gotten?
I never understand using random objects for scale. Paperback books? Well there's a standard. You know what would be great to convey a sense of scale? A fucking ruler!
The Atom benefits hugely in multithreaded tests, where it can make use of HT to keep the pipeline full.
The single 128-bit SSE unit in the Atom compares favorably with the dual 64-bit SSE units in the Pentium M, which is why the Atom approaches performance parity with the similarly-clocked Dothan in the media tests (video, audio). The only processor to maintain a significant lead is the one with TWO 128-bit SSE units, the Celeron. Media performance is one place the Atom will not falter; it is very impressive for such a simple chip.
The processor does tend to fall behind in largely integer operations. As you might expect from the architecture, the Dothan is nearly twice as fast (has two integer pipelines), and the Core-based Celeron is even faster (two integer pipelines, improved cache and a beefed-up decoder). But, as I stated above, this is really amazing: Atom is keeping the pipeline full with nothing more than HyperThreading, or else you'd see a larger than 2x performance gap between it and the Dothan.
All-in-all, a very impressive chip that delivers on what the architecture promised.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Although any purchase you make will be bested within a month, these Atom and Nano CPUs are the new norm, killing all older low-power CPU sales.
In my car, power is important because I run from the battery, but it is still not as critical as in a true portable PC. So I'll wait a little longer and go for the Via Nano which should be much more powerful under (parallel) load, but get almost the same idle power consumption.