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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)
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.
It seems they may be measuring the whole system load in comparing the efficiency of the processors, which is more than a little unfair. What sticks out more, though are numbers like "63,434 watts". Uhmm... no? Besides being a clearly invalid measurement, it should probably be expressed at watt-hours. No way either machine drew 63 kilowatt hours either.
TFA is broken.
SIG: HUP
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.
Full Tilt
And how does it stand up agains a 2.6Ghz Intel Quad Core? Seriously does anyone else see this conspiracy? They couldn't make any faster CPUs so they decided the best business decision was to start over at like 400 MHz and then pretend be making amazing speed increases all over again when really all they're improving is power efficiency a little. Maybe Microsoft should do the same thing and toss 7 out the window and make a Windows 3.1 clone and then go to a 95 clone and soon they'll be back at an incredible re-release of XP!
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Not long ago I only knew VIA as a chipset maker and a maker of chips for some other devices/things that weren't really "brand name" items.
But lately I see them getting more and more into the CPU business. They start pushing out their own motherboards, with their own processors, graphics chips, everything. Not only that, but their processors are beating Intels and their integrated graphics are on par with Intels!
I think it won't be long until we see some real desktop processors for other motherboards coming out- I mean VIA CPUs for ASUS, Foxconn, Supermicro, MSI, etc., competing at the same level with AMD and Intel... I think it's about time, too. We have this underdog who we buy because they're our favorites and not because they're better, still on 65nm processors while Intel has released 45nm and is getting ready to push out 35nm and 25nm- It's time we get some real choice. Maybe we can have a favorite company who also makes the better products. Choice is good.
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
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 1.8GHz Nano setup gets about 25% more performance than the 1.6GHz Atom setup. However the Nano setup uses about 75W under load, while the Atom box uses about 60W. That's about 25% more power consumption/heat output. I imagine an Atom and a Nano setup of equal performance would use equal amounts of juice, or in other words this is a tie in terms of work-per-joule, which is what we're after in mobile processors.
What really bothers me is that the Atom setup seems to use as much power idle as under load. What's going on there? Did the benchmarkers forget to switch on power management or what?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
More benchmarks and analysis here: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/VIA_Nano_L2100_vs_Intel_Atom_230_Head_to_Head/
...with the same findings.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars
The Atom is a bit on the slow side. Like using ARM chips for desktop computing; so why not simply use an ARM chip?
Still, if the Atom's paired with a super low powered chipset we might just finally have computers with more than 8 hours of battery life (while still being affordable/portable/small). Imagine taking your computer to work, and then leaving it on all day. A small detail, but makes a big difference.
The Nano is faster, but it also use about 8 watts more power (according to HardOCP). Those 8 watts is a big deal when it comes to battery life, but OTOH Atom is quite a bit faster than even the fastest Atom. The difference being big enough that HardOCP stated that Vista on Nano was notably more resposive - notable enough to be picked up on in blind tests.
So perhaps Atom trades off too much performace...
For those of you interested, the Atom CPU really DOES use just about 4 watts at load. The 60 watts number is for the entire system including power supply, motherboard, DVD-ROM, hard drive, etc. Idle power on both of these parts is measured in milli-watts so you can see how much power each uses under load by looking at the power consumption graphs on page 8:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=597&type=expert&pid=8
The gap between rest (on the far left) and load (middle) is much greater for the VIA Nano processor than the Intel Atom - in fact you can barely tell the Atom processor has changed wattage at all.
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/
I could have had a first post, too. :(
The real performance for this market should be: Processing Power per Watt and Processing Power per Dollar. Not which one has the most raw Processing Power.
x86-64 and EM64T are the same instruction set.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
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.
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Target is getting serious about Linux laptops. Looking under "Laptops", the first screen of "Featured items" has 3 colors of the EE PC, Linux version, and some HP laptop. The XP version of the EE PC costs $100 more.
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...
OK, let me see if I've got this straight. The VIA Isaiah beat out the Intel Silverthorne. Then the VIA Isaiah was renamed the Via Nano, and the Intel Silverthorne was renamed the Intel Atom. Now the VIA is still beating the Intel? So what you're telling me is that a name change has no effect on chip performance? Well, color me shocked!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
... is the chipset it's paired with. I recently bought an Intel motherboard with an Atom on it. Whilst the CPU is only 4-ish watts, the board draws around 40-50 watts. That's the board, not optical or hard drives.
That northbridge, with the non-power-optimized video card and memory controller, sucks up the juice. The heatsink on the northbridge is 4x larger than the one on the CPU. Furthermore, the heatsink on the northbridge has a fan, where the HS on the CPU has none.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I took my graduate level architecture class from Dean Tullsen at UCSD, who invented 'hyperthreading' although it was called Symmetrical MultiThreading (SMT) back then. As I recall the entire greatness of the architecture was recognizing that all the fancy hardware introduced to allow out-of-order speculative execution could actually be leveraged to allow the processor to drive multiple independent threads at the same time, without much additional overhead. So if intel's atom (haven't been following it) uses an in-order core and hyperthreading that just don't make much sense. Anyone care to provide an explanation?
Am I supposed to be impressed?
The new Cortex-A8 ARM processor consumes 300mW; less than a tenth that of the Atom. The Atom is marginly faster, but not much so --- the figures I've found show that a Cortex develops about 2.0 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz, vs about 2.4 for the Atom. Plus, the Cortex is a CPU core, not a discrete chip; most actual products couple it with an on-chip OMAP DSP engine, which is ideal for doing things like video encoding or decoding or OpenGL. With Atom you end up having to couple it with a dedicated GPU...
The board that Intel is currently selling is paired with a 945G *desktop* chipset. Probably to get it out of the door and reduce stock. That chipset uses 22 watts while the cpu uses 4 watts. When Intel finishes their Atom chipset, there should be a considerable difference between the two as far as power consumption goes.
I think all of this will be moot when the nVidia Tegra devices come out. That will be when I break down and buy either a mini-laptop or a hand-held device.
I was liking both processors up until I found this gem in the article:
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.
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...
The energy star 5 standard requires 50 watts or less at idle, something the old C7-D platforms from via managed quite easily, are they including the display in the system power consumption perhaps, or just using shoddy parts in other spots?
Also, what is the power consumption of the lower end Nano processors? As I recall, the slower nano managed to (barely) outbenchmark the atom, it would be a much better platform to check power consumption against in this case.
I also point out that for these kinds of systems, 3D based benchmarks seem fairly useless, neither platform is targeted at gaming or graphics development.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Nope. Green and red apples would be more like it.
For most intents and purposes, AMD64 and EM64T is the same instruction set. You are probably thinking of IA64 (Itanium).
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
...a watt-second is also known as a joule.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Another worthwhile observation: You can get the Atom motherboard. They're $83 delivered from Newegg. Via has a habit of announcing product and stalling. The are selling this cute little devil though. It's called the "pico-ITX" form factor.
The reviewed item though? Not yet. Until it's available we're comparing what's on the shelf to what's not. Of course the one that comes later is targeted at a slightly higher performance level. It seems likely that when it ships Intel could reply with a machine that has dual Dimms, PCIe X16, dual gigabit nics, and then up the ante with a little DVI goodness and dual core. Everybody knows the chipset supports those features already.
Maybe they'll also do a process shrink on the MCH as well to get the power down.
Personally I'll be getting both. I've played with the Atom board and I like it. These are both good enough boards for some purposes I have in mind and if more better stuff comes along later, well, that's just the way of IT isn't it? If you waited until nothing better was going to come out you might as well go back to pencil and paper.
Help stamp out iliturcy.