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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.
Seems to me that the title is getting across the wrong message. These processors are meant to be placed in ultraportables, where battery life is a MAJOR factor. In that sense, the atom easily beat out the nano here, seeing as they used 4 watts and 18 watts respectively on a full load.
With that amount of difference in power required, it's pretty obvious the nano would beat the atom, but that's like saying a smart car with a V8 is going to beat one with a V4 when it comes to speed (except they should have been testing efficiency, where the V4 blows the other out of the water)
>It seems they may be measuring the whole system load in comparing the efficiency of the processors
I think that's more fair as it's what's relevant to me as a customer of the end product; the computer.
Problem with the Atom side is that the chipsets used are crappy and use more than twice the energy of the CPU itself. So while the CPU might look great on paper, the actual products that use it does not have the fantastic battery times that you'd like (10h+)
These CPUs should be compared together with a viable chipset and memory subsystem combination. Add that up and there's the number you're interested in.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
There's a clear future in little laptop machines that don't cost much and don't use much power, yet are powerful enough to do most of the things most users do with laptops. The low end x86 CPUs are finally good enough to power such machines.
The laptop manufacturers had a Detroit mentality of "more computer per computer". This kept laptop prices up and margins high. But, as it turns out, cramming enough CPU power into a laptop to run wind tunnel simulations isn't what users really need. Especially when the network connection is the bottleneck anyway. The actual uses for a 4-CPU laptop are somewhat limited.
The flood of low-cost laptops has just started. The EE PC set off a race for the bottom. In a year or two, laptops will come in blister packs at the drugstore, in the section with the calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other office supplies. From here on, it's all about lowering margins. Intel and Microsoft will be squeezed hard on price.
The problem is that they don't know how much of that idle load is due to the CPU. You don't know whether that 4 watt difference is due to an efficient high power mode, or a really inefficient low power mode.
for instance, the nano might be 1 watt unloaded and 19 watts fully loaded, while the atom might be 20 watts unloaded and 24 watts loaded. This is clearly not the case, but would be consistent with the results.
http://notanumber.net/
Via's been churning out processor's for years now - it's just that they don't target the average american desktop user. They make slower, cheaper, low power chips that were traditionally intended for very low cost computers sold in Asia (where in some of the poorer economies performance isn't so important as getting the cost down as low as possible), and now in mobile devices where the power consumption is a big issue.
I don't think you'll see Via competing with Intel and AMD in the mainstream desktop business anytime soon - that's a real but increasingly less important venue. People are replacing their computers less often these days (desktop processors have been "fast enough" for a good while now), and there is a big focus on mobile devices these days.
It certainly would be nice to bring back choice in desktop processors though. I remember way back when the Pentiums were on the scene, a customer generally had a choice between Intel, AMD, IDT, Rise, or Cyrix (sometimes marked IBM) processors. Further back in the 486 days you didn't have Rise or IDT but TI made x86 processors back then. The upside too was that back then, everything used the same motherboards/sockets, so going from one chip maker to another was trivial.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
That's the difference in power consumption between idle and load of the ENTIRE SYSTEM, as is clearly stated at the top of the chart.
The TDP on the most power hungry atom is only 4 watts.
Intel needs to pair the atom with an efficient chipset. Unfortunately any of the chipsets Intel currently has available to pair with the atom look like power hogs next to the atom.
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.
And now for the elephant in the room: Why are you encoding MP3s while you're running on batteries?
The normal workload for an ultra-portable running on batteries is not producing MP3s. Its outputting static screens to a beamer during a presentation, or surfing the "series of tubes" via the local WiFi spot between classes (or waiting for the plane). If you've got numbers or MP3s to crunch, save it for when you've got the thing plugged in, silly!
Assuming the average CPU loading is going to be a paltry 2-3% (essentially idle), you're looking at a very capable system using an average of somewhere around 61W vs. a less capable system using only 56W. The difference in battery time between those two is barely significant, which makes the increased potential performance of the Nano a big win in my book. When plugged in, the Nano is a passable desktop replacement. The Atom, not so much.