Slashdot Mirror
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."
Didn't we read similar tests already? The Nano should of course win, since it has out-of-order execution design. But, from what I hear the dual core Atom is at par of the single Nano. When the dual core Nano is released (should be late this year, early next year), it'll wipe the floor with the Atom.
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 VIA chip has built-in crypto accelerators and the idiots running the test pick something that doesn't use it! How about a with and without for comparison?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Processor with markedly higher power draw achieves superior benchmark results. News at 11.
PCMark 2005 has been shown to yield wildly varying results for the nano depending on which CPU ID (CentaurHauls, GenuineAMD, AuthenticIntel) it is being presented with: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/07/atom-nano-review.ars/6. Not surprisingly, if PCMark is made to think it is an Intel CPU, the benchmarks suddenly jump up across the board. Intel money buys good benchmarks.
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..."
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=664
The benchmarks for the new Atom 330, dual-core HyperThreaded CPU seem to turn the tides though.
The Nano has ALWAYS been a better CPU than the Atom but that doesn't seem to matter when it comes to the push that Intel has...
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds."
I was thinking of getting a netbook, but damn, not with that performance. Over 2 minutes? Is this a big miscalculation somehow?
There's data missing for the Atom in the wattage test to the 132 second HTML rendering, I'm not sure this test is anywhere near correct...for anything.
What kind of MONSTER HTML file are they throwing at these systems? Why put the Cinebench multi CPU benchmark up if it doesn't show any data at all except for the Pentium E5200 (the Atom is a single core CPU, why even run it?). And how is a Cinebench 64 bit test running on Vista 32 bit?
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?" :)
They were using Windows Vista.
...50% more? since when? Sure, the Nano may use more power, but it's nowhere near 50% more. 60.1*1.5 is 90.15, and x2 it's 120.2. The Nano tops out at 77.5. Making up bullshit is not "interesting" or "insightful".
Not A HTML page, HTML pages . i-bench is a browser torture test discontinued in 2003 and the HTML dates back to 2001 so it's not too relevant to today's web where CSS and DOM dominate, not table based layouts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Apparently making up bullshit is interesting.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
does it run crysis?
2.6 FPS :)
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
*Disclaimer: I work for Intel
*Disclaimer 2: I actually do software research for Intel, and I haven't a clue about anything to do with hardware or business
I have a little EEE pc with an Atom 1.6GHz - I'm actually find it does have enough compute for most of what I do.
I did a stopwatch test on my computer - it takes less than 45 seconds from pushing the power button to getting on the network and rendering a web page. I'm running WinXP, but people have reported significantly better numbers with Linux.
The only time where I find I'm wishing for more compute power is when I'm watching HD flash video. (like Hulu or Youtube in HD mode - I get dropped frames)
I believe this is because Flash is written really quite poorly, and the video rendering code isn't very good. If I download the video and play it with VLC or something, it plays smoothly.
This is really the only reason I want more compute power on my eee pc. I'm actually hoping silverlight takes off so I don't have this problem anymore.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Um, RTFA? 48W*1.5=72W, 68~=72.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
TFA has the Atom based unit running 48W full out and the Nano based unit at 43W idle (no numbers given for Atom system strangely). I think it's safe to assume the Atom unit is drawing significantly less than 43W at idle if it uses 48W running synthetic benchmarks.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It also depends whether it would be worth using more power but finishing the task quicker, assuming that when idling they would be more or less comparable. One problem the Atom has had so far is that the chipsets they have been paired with draw a lot of power by themselves making the power savings less noticeable than they could have been.
50% more power my foot.
The Intel Atom at 1.6Ghz is a 2-4 watt processor.
While they hide it in the details of their press release a bit, the VIA Nano processor running at 1Ghz is the 8 Watt processor I believe you're referring to while the 1.8Ghz processor tips the scales at around 25 Watts.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I don't believe you.
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?" :)
Very large web page. 17 seconds on an e5200 (That's a 2.5Ghz Core2Duo).
I had a feeling the second I learned the Atom was an In-Order processor that it was going to suck. Sure enough, it feels rather sluggish. Getting a dual core + dual threaded Atom might be better.
VIA's documentation is a nightmare to trudge through. Their hardware is usually great, but designing a product around it tends to be very difficult. With Intel, OTOH, we usually have no trouble getting a hold of an engineer if we have questions. Poor VIA...we'd love to use their chip but their support just isn't dependable when we have deadlines to meet.
I hope the netbook crowd (Acer esp) can muscle some legit documentation from them-- I'd take the Nano over the Atom any day.
Because you'll get a chance to catch up on reading a book while your browsing the net.
Thank you for pointing that out, I couldn't tell from the GGP's moderation. ;)
I'm talking about from TFA the power draw of the entire system. I don't really give a crud about how low power the CPU is, I care how much battery life I can get out of a give weight in batteries. The Atom based unit draws 48W full tilt vs 68W for the Nano based system, heck the Nano system draws 43W idle!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Apparently making up bullshit is interesting.
Yes, it is.
This guy's the limit!
But it doesn't have a chipset drawing more power than the CPU, either.
www.isoHunt.com
Please tell me you're kidding and you aren't _that_ clueless regarding iBench.
Maybe its time for Folding@on-the-go.
Not A HTML page, HTML pages . i-bench is a browser torture test discontinued in 2003 and the HTML dates back to 2001 so it's not too relevant to today's web where CSS and DOM dominate, not table based layouts.
You, sir, need to be modded informative before another dozen "my netbook renders web pages in 2 seconds - they must be using Vista lolz" posts go up.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm sorry I misinterpreted your response to a processor-related article to not be about the processors being analyzed.
As a side note, I'd like to add that it's funny that as I said the Nano benchmarked is a 25 watt processor and the Atom benchmarked is a 4 watt and the difference between the overall benchmarked system power at full load is 20 watts... Of course that couldn't be related to the processors being 21 watts apart... because you:
"don't really give a crud about how low power the CPU is"
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Yeah, it's 1.5-2x faster but it also draws 50% more power
That means if it is under clocked to draw the same power it's still likely 50% faster. That's still a win for VIA. Heck, even if you under clock it and its only 20% faster, faster is still faster. I'm not sure how you see that as a lose.
Actually, this implies that the difference in power of JUST the CPU is far more than 50%. This is because most of the system's power draw is NOT from the CPU. Lets assume for instance that at idle the Atom processor consumes 5 watts of power (the rest of the system consumes the rest). This means that at idle the VIA cpu consumes almost 8 watts of power (both these estimates are perfectly reasonable based on the class of processors that they are). This estimates means that when idling the VIA cpu is consuming 50% more power than the atom.
Now, when the cpus are at load, the Atom processor is consuming ~8.5 watts of power, and the VIA is consuming ~25 or 26 watts of power. This looks to me that the via processor is consuming 4 times the power of the Atom, not merely 50% more.
Of course, this estimate is assuming that the Atom processor's idle power is only 5 watts. In reality, the idle power it consumes is likely even lower, as it was designed to minimize power dissipation. Now, claiming that the VIA's system power is approximately 50% more than the Atom is not accurate, but that doesn't mean that the CPU is not consuming that much more power. Anyone doing a fair comparison between the processors would likely be focusing on the difference in power of the CPUs themselves. Otherwise in a full system, the difference between a CPU that requires 50 Watts of power, and one that requires 100Watts of power wouldn't be that significant.
Phil
Well it would be interesting to see the 1GHz Nano vs the 1.6GHz Atom since they would appear to have about the same power envelope once chipset is considered (assuming all other parts between the two units were equivalent) but that's not what the article was comparing at all so claiming the the Nano bests the Atom was way off base.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
thank god, someone gets it!!!!
the only thing that is stopping via from being HUGE is their gpu. if they had a faster, more reliable solution we'd all be using via netbooks right now.
The power consumption numbers in TFA are totally useless as applied to netbooks. My laptop (an ultraportable, not a netbook... it has a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo in it) uses maybe 25 watts at full load, and maybe 8-9 watts at idle, counting the screen and wireless (that's in Windows; Linux uses slightly more power for some reason).
TFA quotes one system at 48 watts and the other at 68 watts under load. You can't say that this is representative of their performance in a netbook.
The real question is, if you compare them with chipsets, clock speed, voltages, hardware, power management strategies etc that are suitable for a netbook, how is the power consumption and performance? TFA doesn't address that, so it's basically useless.
Also, remember that the two power figures of merit for a netbook are idle power and joules per operation. Suppose that procs A and B are the same at idle, and that B uses twice as much extra power under load than A, but is twice as fast. Then B wins almost no matter what you're doing (yadda cooling yadda voltage ramp yadda yadda).
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Well it would be interesting to see the 1GHz Nano vs the 1.6GHz Atom since they would appear to have about the same power envelope once chipset is considered (assuming all other parts between the two units were equivalent) but that's not what the article was comparing at all so claiming the the Nano bests the Atom was way off base.
And on that I completely agree.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_pwr.jpg
Why doesn't Intel get scored on IDLE power consumption? Who cares about MAXIMUM when idle is the state that most of these netbooks will be in. wtf?
That's not quite true. Most of the use of a netbook doesn't need a powerful CPU, it's true. Currently my Atom-powered netbook has clocked itself down to 1 Ghz; for posting on slashdot, nothing more is necessary. However, that's not to say that there is never a need for it to scale back up. It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
I would want a faster processor if only to reduce bootup time. Although I hear that others have made do with the existing processor limitations.
Also, eight hours on a charge? Where can I get me some of that?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
They did give the idle power for the Nano system though, 43W which is within 10% of the Atom system full out. I really wish they had given the idle numbers for the Atom system, that missing piece would most likely strongly back my argument. Gah, I just did a bit more reasearch and they used the freaking DESKTOP chipset for the Atom. That thing draws 17W more than the portable version which further exacerbates the difference between the platforms.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
If you buy a Toyota Echo, you have an affordable little car that will reliably get you from Point A to Point B. But you have to accept that your cargo capacity is going to be rather limited, and even if it's possible to get it above 85mph on the highway, the car wasn't really designed to do that.
Wow 100 guys from Austin, TX (www.centtech.com) can make an x86 bests Chipzilla?!?! Centaur Technology FTW!
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
Old benchies from last august put them at equal battery life, which suggests to me that it's the size of the battery affecting the battery life of the netbook - not the Atom or Nano CPU.
It's long been known that Nanos are incredibly fast compared to Atoms.
Now if only I could buy one. "Released" a year ago, huh? Where? :P
Naa it is a cheap chip... The 1.6Ghz Desktop boards are much less than $100... The Samsung NC20 which uses the Nano is sub $500
Agreed, same here. But I'm still waiting for the Ion platform to come out, which should best both of them, giving a good performance mark between the Atom/Nano and the Core 2 Duo.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Thanks for the info, that is the real story that was completely missed by the article. The main benefits of atom are obscured when attached to a lot of power-hungry peripherals.
Also, eight hours on a charge? Where can I get me some of that?
you can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NC10-14GBK-10-2-Inch-Netbook-Processor/dp/B001O94FY8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1234307109&sr=8-2
its rates it at 6, but other places rate it at 8. to be completely fair - i do own this bit of kit and i regularly get a reading of 6hours batter left. and i run xp - linux would probably realize that 8 hours
So they compare the power consumption of _Netbook_ CPUs by comparing the power consumption of _Desktop_ motherboards running _Vista_, when every netbook I'm aware of runs XP or Linux and Intel is world-renowned for having tied the desktop Atom to an appallingly crappy, backward and power-hungry chipset?
Then we should be surprised that they discover that a CPU which takes far more power than the Atom gives better performance in tests which are probably single-threaded and hence not even using the Atom's CPU to its full capacity?
I haven't done this maths so this might all be wrong.
But if you spend more time waiting for the Atom to do stuff do you get more usable time out of the Atom or Nano, rather than waiting for it to computer something. So your 8 hours might be something like 6 with 2 hours waiting for the computer to catch up.
...50% more? since when? Sure, the Nano may use more power, but it's nowhere near 50% more. 60.1*1.5 is 90.15, and x2 it's 120.2. The Nano tops out at 77.5. Making up bullshit is not "interesting" or "insightful".
You should investigate further before you claim bullshit.
In fact, the OP was quite generous to Nano. The 1.8 GHz Nano is rated (by Via) at 25W TDP (Thermal Design Power). The 1.6 GHz Atom 230 (desktop version) is rated (by Intel) at 4W TDP, the N270 (1.6 GHz netbook version) at 2.5W, and the latest N280 (1.666 GHz netbook) is a mere 2.0W. I'm sure Intel and Via use slightly different methods for measuring TDP, but not that different, you know?
Nano doesn't seem to have separate desktop and netbook versions. If you want the highest speed grade Nano in your netbook, you're going to be putting in a CPU which draws 12.5x as much power as the N280.
Re: the PC Perspective review you linked, you need to be aware that (1) PCPER measured whole-system power consumption, not the processor by itself, and (2) Intel's Atom desktop boards ship with an extremely old integrated graphics chipset which uses so much power that it actually requires a fan (the Atom CPU itself doesn't). Go back to your link and scroll down to the graph of entire-system power consumption during MP3 encode. Notice how the Atom's graph is nearly flat, going up by only ~3W during activity? That's because in this case, even at full load, the CPU accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of the total system power.
The story's a bit different in netbook land, where Intel will sell you a different version of the CPU with a more modern chipset. The netbook version features a reduced power variant of Intel's standard front-side bus. (The 'desktop' version of the Atom uses the normal Intel FSB, which increases its TDP and makes it compatible with the ancient chipset mentioned above.) The total TDP of an Atom N270 plus the netbook chipset (north+south bridge) is about 12W, less than half the TDP of the top speed bin Nano CPU all by itself.
The Nano's problem in a nutshell: its ULV low clocked versions still uses much more power than even the fastest single core Atom variants (5W TDP @ 1.0 GHz is the wimpiest version Via lists), but then loses its performance advantage. The high clock rate versions which destroy Atom in performance benchmarks use about as much power as a low or midrange Core 2 Duo. But even if you disable one core, a C2D is going to completely destroy the Nano in any benchmark. The only advantage Nano has over C2D for a CPU in the ~15-25W TDP power class is really low idle power consumption (500mW for the top 1.8 GHz speed bin, 100mW for the rest).
Unfortunately for Via, that advantage has not proven compelling enough for any manufacturer of portable computers to jump on the Nano. And it has literally no advantages for netbooks, where you never want a CPU over 10W. Via's been trying to get design wins for a long time now, and nobody's biting.
Oh, and there's one other problem they face: they might try to buy design wins by pricing it really low to make up for its shortcomings, but that's a game they can't win. Nano's die is ~63mm^2, Atom's is ~26mm^2. They can probably sell cheaper than a 45nm Core 2 Duo (82mm^2 for 3MB L2 cache variants), but not enough to make up for the C2D's vastly better performance within the same thermal envelope.
You've never driven an Echo, have you? It was not a third row of seats, be any measure, but they broke some laws of physics and reality to put that much trunk space in those cars.
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages"
Good to see IE8 coming out of beta
don't you mean FPM?
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
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).
Yea, but you didn't set the details right, I got it going close to 60 SPF.
Err... Please tell me that I'm missing something here.
How about the s? On the end of "pages"?
I don't use my Atom-powered netbook for physics simulations, so I spend zero time waiting for it to "do stuff." The network speed is pretty much always the bottleneck.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The Samsung NC10, as well as several Asus modles do 8 hours. MSI has a version of the Wind with an 8 hour battery, too.
Personally, I bought the NC10. It seems to be slightly superior to its peers in every category (except price--markets at work, I guess).
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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."
Even if netbooks (whatever that comes to mean, netbooks keep evolving into more powerful machines, people start saying, "Ya email and surfing is great but what about some modern games and Matlab?", but I digress) don't turn out to be huge (I disagree, who doesn't want a machine with insane battery life?) the whole overpowered phones with intertubes will be huge. So if VIA plays their cards right, (and ARM for that matter) they could have a really huge untapped market on their hands.
Failure formatting five FAQs of financial facts.
It's interesting they didn't run any real crypto tests that actually, you know, *used* the Nano properly. The Nano comes with the Padlock engine built in, for hardware crypto. With Padlock-aware software running crypto, the Nano "spanks" Core 2 Quads with lots of welly and gives even Intel's i7 a run for its money.
Da Blog
Plus benchmarking these things running Windows Vista? Are you nuts? I mean, XP is bad enough.
If anything, the real issue with netbooks is that they are too good for the industry model. They make the majority of laptops look just too big, expensive and heavy. How many CIOs are wondering how many of their sales force really need Thinkpads and could get by quite happily with a netbook, a bluetooth mouse and a small projector? With the same technology in thin clients or low power desktops, you can do everything real users need, give the execs their Asus Lamborghinis or their Macbook Airs, and still save a lot of money at the next refresh.
As noted above, the answer to performance issues is to start fixing bloatware. Microsoft shareholders are rightly asking why so much money goes on very, very speculative R&D, but perhaps they should be asking what would happen if the same effort went into redesigning Office so that (a) it worked really fast on small low power computers and (b) the user interface was properly tailored for small screens. It can be done - Chrome makes more efficient use of small screen real estate than Firefox does, but some real investment could, I'm sure, make the whole thing so much better.
Out there, the real world is suddenly discovering that small cars are more economical, easier to drive and park than big ones, that big houses cost a lot to heat and cool, and that in general despite what marketing tries to tell you bigger is just bigger, not automatically better.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What surprises me is that its only twice as fast.
A Looong time ago, when htpc's were becoming something interesting in AU (not long before digital tv was broadcast on all stations in AU - around 2002). I bought an epia nehemiah m10k (there weren't many to choose from at the time, the m8k was the other one and the big diff between the two was one was passive cooled and the other active - i got the active one for the extra cpu grunt).
Anyways, a short time ago I noticed that intel were shipping mini-itx boards and I was initially interested in the conroe-capable (dual and quad core) mini-itx boards, but also happened to get a netbook (the original acer ones a110 i think?). What I wanted was a small box i could shove into the small space somewhere in our IDC for taking mail relay traffic and doing a small amount of web serving (php gallery).
So I installed fedora 10 onto the atom on an external 320gb usb hd. At some point I remembered the epia I had lying around (still had a 256m stick of ram in it - versus the atom's 1.5gb) and when it died originally I never bothered to figure out whether the power supply had bit the dust or the board itself.
Long story short, I plugged it into a new psu, and it managed to boot quite cleanly the exact same OS I had installed onto the ATOM.
So they were running an identical OS, the results were quite astounding. Running Super pi at 8m digits took 70s on the epia and 39s on the atom. I also ran a few others but they all came out roughly the same, the atom was about twice as quick.
Now remember the atom came out last year or late 2007 (cant remember) while the epia is from 2002.
So if the new nano is only twice as quick, i'd be surprised. But it is also somewhat more expensive (in AU at least). I'll probably still end up with atom 330 (dual-core) based itx board, just cause its easier to get my hands on.
And still, your whole dissertation -- which apparently comes straight out of your uninformed ass -- is completely useless,
since the Atom can only be so low in power usage, because all the power-draining stuff is in the north-bridge!
Have you ever looked at a board with an Atom CPU? The thing with the big fat cooler is the north-bridge. That what looks like the north-bridge is the actual Atom CPU!
And if you take the sum of the power those two chips need, they lose to every "netbook CPU"! By far...
But as long as there are parrots and retards who think because they can pull it out of their ass, it must be true, Intel will do just fine, selling its fraud chips. And you are directly responsible for that fraud too. So thank you... really... (NOT!)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
First the typo - the board is D945GCLF
Second, why didn' they use the dual-core, hyper-threading Atom MB, the D945GCLF2? The latest board, the D945GCLF2 includes Gigabit Ethernet, not Fast Ethernet. Link
Finally, I've built systems with each of the "Little Falls" MBs from Intel, and all nice (considering cost) and very-capable MB/CPU combos. If the VIA CPUs are "better" that's great, but they tend to be very pricey by comparison ($85 for Intel vs. $285 for the VIA EPIA SN 1.8 GHz board referenced)
Ken