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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
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.
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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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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?
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.
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.