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VIA Nano Bests Intel Atom In Netbook Benchmarks
Glib Piglet writes "ZDNet UK has a whole set of benchmarks comparing a 1.8 GHz Nano in VIA's Epia SN motherboard and a 1.6 GHz Atom in Intel's 'Little Falls' D945GCFL mobo. It's not good news for Chipzilla: 'As far as memory performance is concerned, the Nano is clearly superior in every test' and 'The VIA Nano emerges as the better processor for internet tasks. While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.' The Nano even outperforms Nehalem on one test. It's not all a win for VIA, though. The benchmark concludes that in some ways all netbooks, underpowered as they are, remain in the IT stone ages."
Unfortunately, all of that is largely theoretical until VIA can score some design wins, which is a pity because the present state of things doesn't exactly motivate chipzilla to drop margins or loosen restrictions on Atom.
The real news here is that even with these numbers, VIA will manage to blow whatever opportunity they have to gain advantage on netbooks.
It'll either be overpriced, hard to obtain in quantity or both. VIA seems to have a bad habit of showing stuff that, while it isn't vaporware, it's not something you'll actually SEE short of a consumer electronics show somewhere.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.
With those speeds, why do they call these things "netbooks?" :)
Or maybe for free (as in performance) whole-system disk encryption?
Unfortunately, 'reviewers' think it beneath them to actually do any work beyond running their standardized tests. I've tried to reason with some of them before. They'll just continue running their LAME-MT and non-padlock enabled truecrypt or whatever. I tell you though, with Intel finally having crypto primitives in their new instruction set, they'll have to adapt sooner or later. Just as soon as Intel provide the how-to and/or software for them to blindly follow.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I agree. This review misses the point entirely. Netbooks are about portability--size and battery life. An Intel Atom-powered netbook can do all your web/officy stuff (as well as full-screen Hulu) and run for eight hours on a charge. There is no benefit in bumping the speed up a touch if that means shortening battery life.
If you want video editing and gaming capabilities, netbooks aren't for you. The only netbook processors that might interest me would be those that give me more speed with the same or less power use as the Atom.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The whole power usage thing as classically measured by what the processor draws under load doesn't exactly produce a fair and accurate picture. For instance, since AMD chips of recent years have tended to consume more power than Intel offerings. However, the north bridge for AMD chips consumes less power than for Intel in large part because the memory controller is bolted onto the AMD chip rather than the north bridge. Also, if a processor consumes say 50 watts of power and completes a given task in 15 seconds and another processor consumes 35 watts and completes the same task in 25 seconds the second processor has actually consumed more power.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
"The benchmark concludes that in some ways all netbooks, underpowered as they are, remain in the IT stone ages."
i don't know what kind of netbooks they're talking about, all newer netbooks (with decent resolution like 1024x600+ and 1gb of ram with a intel atom or via nano) perform VERY well, you can play quake3 in those using the onboard intel chip at the netbook lcd's native resolution, you can install windows xp and use that normally or go the [better] linux way and have a fully capable machine for programming, fun , studies.....
i used to listen to mp3s while programming on my first linux box , and that was a pentium 166mhz with 64mb of ram.....kernel 2.2.dontknow, can you guys tell me where 1.6ghz of processor with usb/wifi/bluetooth/1gb of ram/3d accelerated graphics is stone age? i wonder why they allow this kind of bullshit to reach slashdot's front page T__T
It's actually pretty easy to go 136 km/h (85 mph) in a Toyota Echo. I'd say anything up to 160 km/h is trivial. Over that and buffeting winds or curved roads will probably make you uncomfortable. But still, it'll go all the way to the 180 km/h limit where the governor kicks in. And that's probably just because the stock tires are only rated to 180 km/h (like stock tires for almost every car).