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

Small Server

[bhima]

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.

Re:Small Server

[oodaloop]

How does a 5-digit /. user ID talking about desired computer specs qualify as troll? What the hell is going on around here lately?

Re:Small Server

[thanatos_x]

Probably because...

1. There is a correlation between seniority and intelligence/common sense in many things. There may and can be outliers. Out of 99,999 users, you'd be bound to find a few trolls.
2. More likely it's because the poster seems to not care at all about a tiny 2W processor with reasonable performance. It's a fairly big step, but his choice of wording suggests he's completely... indignant.

"Car manufacturer comes out with car that gets 230 mpg"

Pfft. I'll care when they do that and give me a nice 0-60 time and 120 top speed. Oh, and when they seat 4 people.
OR
That's impressive, but the real test will be to see if they can make the vehicle usable, maintaining enough appeal to overcome American bias to large, powerful cars.

They say the same things, but there's a world of difference between how they come off.

Re:Microsoft as Hardware Cop?

[mikeabbott420]

A crude way to force more powerful machines to use Vista. They can't use Vista levels of bloat in the emerging niche of MIDs ( or whatever they're called this week) but they still want to force everyone else to buy Vista. A big part of the Vista bloat and driver problems is Microsofts dream of DRM controlling our computers so they can make deals with content owners. Thus Microsoft needs to limit user choice as much as they can because XP may be good enough for your needs but its DRM isn't good enough for Microsoft needs.

Re:Microsoft as Hardware Cop?

[TheRaven64]

Differentiation. They are not limiting the size of the hard drive, they are limiting the size of the hard drive you are allowed to ship to qualify for very steep OEM discounts. They are attempting to sell the idea of 'XP on small/cheap machines, Vista on big/expensive machines' to avoid the market deciding that what it really wants is Linux on small/cheap machines. They can't compete directly with Linux on price (unless they pay people to ship Windows, which would only work if they then sold these customers Office or something), but they can compete on legacy compatibility. People aren't willing to pay 50% more for a laptop to run their legacy software, but the might be willing to pay 10-20% more, and so they offer a cheap version of Windows for cheap computers in the hope that people will say 'it's $20 more, but that's probably worth it to be able to run my old programs'. Whether or not this will work remains to be seen.

What's the blursted wattage??

[lawaetf1]

[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]

Intel's Atom is copying AMD's Geode

[Khyber]

Atom is only here because of AMD's Geode, so Intel should be playing the copycat game.

Re:Microsoft as Hardware Cop?

[javilon]

So what about shipping a huge monster machine in every respect except the hard drive? it can be upgraded later on. This would make for really cheap licenses on expensive machines.