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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.
My blog
More info and benchmarks at http://anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3321
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?
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 ???
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?
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.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
That's the problem with young geeks these days. No respect for their elders. What with their "pwned" and their "kthxbye" and their fancy-dan slidey-outie phones, why some of them barely have guts! And their beards! Little whispy things ... Makes me want to bust the keyboard off my Kaypro and come out swingin'! Just be glad papaw had his adderall this morning.
Wow, I didn't know there were any 3-digiters left alive. Since there's only a few WWI vets left, I figured you were all long since dead.
[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"
No... I don't really get mating a 2 watt processor (which I want) with a inefficient 3D video chip (which I do not want). I do recognize that what I want network & storage wise is probably a tiny fraction of the atom market but I still hold out hope that some more enthusiastic slashdot reader will jump in and link to the board I want buy. It certainly has happened before... more than once.
BTW: VW is claiming they will be making their "1 Liter Car" in 2010... 1 liter per 100km is just over 235 MPG. I plan to buy one. I think they're very cool and if you haven't seen it you should check it out
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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
That's the problem with young geeks these days. No respect for their elders. What with their "pwned" and their "kthxbye" and their fancy-dan slidey-outie phones, why some of them barely have guts! And their beards! Little whispy things ... Makes me want to bust the keyboard off my Kaypro and come out swingin'! Just be glad papaw had his adderall this morning
Ooooh, tell us another story, Grandpa! Maybe about walking to school or making electricity from lemons, then making lemonade cause wasting is a sin.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
The pictured unit from TFA looks to be just small enough to fit in the trunk of that "1 liter car"(which btw, does look good. I want one.)
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
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.
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
Ah
Not only do we use a non-standard unit, but we use a non-standard unit of that unit?
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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.