VIA Nano CPU Benchmarked, Beats Intel Atom

Vigile writes "Back in May, when the Isaiah architecture was first disclosed, VIA declared a performance victory over Intel's upcoming Silverthorne technology. Since then, Isaiah has become the VIA Nano processor, and Silverthorne changed to the Intel Atom — and now we can finally see tests comparing the two technologies. The Nano's out-of-order super-scalar design is definitely an architectural leap over the Atom's in-order single-issue design, but with Intel including HyperThreading technology in their CPU the competition is closer than expected. The Nano does win the performance tests by a considerable margin, but what might be more impressive is seeing the Atom use only 4 watts of power under full load!" As reader Mierdaan points out, that's 4 watts more than at idle, for about 60 watts total.

Comments

Almost had me going there...

[Rayeth]

The atom doesn't use 4 watts under full load. It just used 4 extra watts. I knew that was too good to be true.

Re:Misleading title?

[jmorris42]

Well yes and no. Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state. When that is factored in the contest is a bit closer. Of course if the Nano does run for long it is going to bake your lap more than the Atom and drain the battery a lot faster.

Looking at the photos makes it plain where the problem now lies, the northbridge. If Intel can get theirs under control they will totally dominate the low power business. But since the Nano draws so much more power a low power northbridge won't help them as much, which bodes ill for the future. Intel has a lot more room for improvement while Via would have to pull a major rabbit out of their hat to cut much off their current power consumption numbers.

And for small computers that aren't running on batteries but do need to be fairly cool (i.e. quiet) the Nano will be the hands down winner just because Intel is playing marketing games.

Re:The chart shows 60 watts

[pwnies]

The 60 watts is what the entire system is using. That includes the hard drive, the RAM, psu, mobo, etc etc.
They get the 4 watts from observing that when idle the system is at 56 watts, but when at a full load it meanders over to the 60.1 watt range.

60-56 = 4

explaination of energy efficiency

[Sebastopol]

The article writers don't seem to be very technical guys.

If we look at the energy efficiency, Atom hands Via it's bilblical arse.

Let's talk about Joules, the things a battery stores. Batteries are important. Especially for the target marget of these two CPUs. In fact, battery life is most likely THE most important factor in anything below a notebook.

Keep in mind a battery only has so many joules between charges, that's obvious, I know.

Now, an efficient architecture would only use as many joules as needed to get the job done in a timely manner. Joules per seconds are Watts, btw.

So lets look at how these two stack up in terms of Joule consumption and Performance based on this data...

The VIA requires about 17W of power to chug through MP3 encode, for about 460 seconds. That means the power supply had to deliver 17 * 460 = 7,820 joules.

Now the Atom crawled along 30% slower, about 600 seconds to complete. But it only needed a delivery rate of 4 J/s, so it ate 2,400 joules.

So for a 30% improvement in performance, VIA had to gobble down MORE THAN THREE TIMES the energy!

That means you could encode 3x as many MP3s on an atom, but it will take 30% longer. Imagine if this was an iPod. Who would trade 3x less battery life for such a tiny bump? That isn't something to brag about when you are targeting a market starving for battery life.

I'll be really surprised if Via goes anywhere other than a few cheap Asian design wins.