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

Wait for the next generation

[eebra82]

If you're not in a rush to get one of the Atom/Nano based computers, wait for the next generation. Although both CPU:s are excellent in performance, the next iterations will bring two cores and far better efficiency.

The first generation of any product line is usually fairly rushed and experimental. That does not mean the product itself is bad, but we should expect a big jump from the next generation.

Platform choice

[Outland Traveller]

I was liking both processors up until I found this gem in the article:

If there is egg to be thrown in anyone's face from this article, it is on Intel for its locking down of the Atom platform. Since Computex this year I have been hearing complaints from board vendors on the amount of restrictions Intel is putting on them for Atom products. Vendors are not allowed to build Atom motherboards with PCI Express, digital video outputs or more than one memory slot. VIA on the other hand is openly courting board manufacturers to put as much technology on a mini-ITX design as they can - as long as they DO build one!

Here we see Intel, up to its obnoxious "You'll use our technology only as we prescribe" games. This is the same philosophy that leisurely milked the market for 33Mhz CPU bumps every 6 months, while they sat on years worth of better technology, until AMD lit a fire under their ass.

Don't be fooled again.

Biggers news: PCMark 2005 skews memory tests

[copponex]

Reading through that article, I found this:

My my. Swap CentaurHauls for AuthenticAMD, and Nano's performance magically jumps about 10 percent. Swap for GenuineIntel, and memory performance goes up no less than 47.4 percent. This is not a test error or random occurance; I benchmarked each CPUID multiple times across multiple reboots on completely clean Windows XP installations. The gains themselves are not confined to a small group of tests within the memory subsystem evaluation, but stretch across the entire series of read/write tests. Only the memory latency results remain unchanged between the two CPUIDs.

Whoops! I wonder what they'll have to say about that...