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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.
which is totally what she said
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.
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I believe the MSI Wind will eventually roll-out with some 3G card. There was a prototype earlier. Not sure which/when. Just keep a look out at gadget sites.
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.
OK, So I checked and to get a closer comparison of two new chips (the C7 is several years old now), Intel Atom (45nm) vs Via Nano (65nm).
Atom = 4 W.
Nano = 17W.
Keep in mind that the C7 has been shown to be faster than the Atom, and the Nano is twice as fast as the C7. On a performance/watt basis that puts Nano much closer to the Atom than even I thought.
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
I'd like to note that aside from the Core series of chips actually developing in terms of the microarchitecture, rather than just process shrinking an old design, the Atom is an all-new core from the ground up. It's a very different microarchitecture from the Core 2.