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."

Comments

Re:Me too!

[TheRaven64]

The Pentium M isn't exactly the P3 architecture. It incorporates the branch predictor from the P4 (much improved over the P3, since the long pipeline in the P4 made branch miss-predictions incredibly expensive) and a few other things. The Core 1 was a modified Pentium M, and the Core 2 is a completely new microarchitecture, incorporating a lot of things not in the Pentium M (64-bit mode, SSE4, micro-op fusion, and so on).

The Atom is closest to the Pentium MMX than any other Intel CPU. It is in-order, for one thing, while every other Intel chip since the Pentium Pro has been out-of-order. It supports SMT, making it fairly unique among Intel chips (only the P4 did this before, and it has almost nothing else in common with the Atom), which helps avoid pipeline stalls caused by the lack of instruction re-ordering.

Long live battery life

[Lupu]

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?

Re:Echoes of the "Sidewinder"

[BJH]

You're mixing up two similar (in form factor) machines, that were otherwise quite different in architecture and time of availability.

One is the Alpha-based DEC Multia/UDB, from way back in the mid '90s. LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Slashdot was originally run on one of these.

The other is the StrongARM-based Netwinder, which appeared around the year 2000.

They did have one thing in common other than their size - they both tended to overheat if they weren't stood up vertically.