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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
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.
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
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.
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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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