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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."
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.
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.
With those speeds, why do they call these things "netbooks?" :)
No idea what the hell they're trying to render, but my netbook renders just about every page I visit at about the same speed as my desktop machine. If there's any difference, I don't notice it.
This guy's the limit!
...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.
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Apparently making up bullshit is interesting.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds."
Whoosh?
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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
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?
"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
...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.