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Intel Launches Next-Gen Atom N450 Processor
MojoKid writes "Intel has unveiled its next-generation Atom N450 processor, and a review of the new Asus Eee PC 1005PE netbook that houses it shows decent gains in performance and lower power consumption. The Atom N450 has been re-architected similar to Intel's other notebook processors in that it now has an integrated memory controller and graphics core on the CPU itself. In addition, Intel's serial DMI (Direct Media Interface) now replaces the system bus to the Southbridge IO controller. From a performance standpoint, the Atom N450 single core chip offers a nice performance gain versus previous generation Atom CPUs and it appears Intel has dual-core variants of the chip on the horizon as well."
Is the new integrated graphics core a descendant of intel's much maligned; but well supported in linux, GMA950 line, or is it another take on the HD-media-accelerating-but-dear-god-the-drivers-oh-why-does-it-hurt GMA500 stuff?
What Midnight Blue? Oh, you mean underneath all those stickers? Seriously, why do non-Apple laptops always look like Nascar, erm, cars?
Intel and Adobe both have completely dropped the ball, but right now it's Intel that's in trouble. The only "netbook" I know that can handle fullscreen flash is the LT3013u; At 12" and $350 it hits the price point okay but misses size. Still, it's at least got a 720p display, which means it has to do more than most of the competition to even break even — it does better than that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now only few other pieces of the puzzle in the quest for ultimate ultraportable.
Pixel Qi screen, for even longer battery life and legibility in sunlight.
With lower temps & power draw of Pinetrail it might be also possible for netbooks to become routinely cooled passively.
Also just for me and other faithful...uhm...clit ;p (plus preferably as close in overall form to original Lenovo S10 as possible, it was actually very nice) Can't help it, playing Diablo2 in a cathedral during organ concert, on a cemetery on 1 XI night (it looks like this here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wszystkich_swietych_cmentarz.jpg ) and in a train while sitting next to some nuns are things I simply must do. And with touchpad that's not really possible.
One that hath name thou can not otter
For 2 years now I've been reading that ARM netbooks with awesome battery lifes are just around the corner.
So, where are they? Newegg lists exactly *zero* of them. No local store in my entire city of 500K people has a single one - I have called around to verify this. Not one!
I'm aware of the "alwaysinnovating" thing, but for various reasons I don't like it, and anyway it's just a beagleboard.
Where are the dozens of choices in different configurations that were supposed to hit the market? First we heard Q408. Then we hear Q409. Well, Q409 is about over... At some point I'll give up and just buy a damn Atom based one.
RTFA: "The graphics core is a basic DX9 instantiation that is a kin to Intel's GMA500 graphics core in the previous generation Intel 945G chipset"
The Atom N450 has been re-architected ...
Wow -- I guess it was waaaaay too advanced to merely be "re-designed".
This would be a whole lot more interesting if Intel didn't have a pretty solid track record of producing some of the worst GPUs on the market. Perhaps the performance and power gains are more than I'm expecting, but from my perspective this seems like a pretty transparent move to cut Nvidia out of the netbook chipset market, and consequently cut down on consumer options on how they want to configure these types of machines as well.
Intel has been tearing apart their Linux graphics stack and rewritting it for the future. For a while, that meant poor performance during the rewrite, but it really is getting better. Intel is really helping push DRI2, GEM, TTM, UXA, etc.
At least Intel does their development in the open. Didn't Intel also contribute code to Moblin to optimize Moblin performance on their hardware? I'd like to see some more general kernel enhancements for these processors. Any speed increase over Windows on the most common netbook processor is a huge win.
Chrome OS is already fast. If Intel can help make it faster when comparing it side-by-side to 7, it only helps Linux adoption on the whole.
I also have a small tangental question. I always hear about huge performance gains that can come from properly writing code to take advantage of SSE2,3,4,etc instruction sets. I also hear that almost no one does write code to take advantage of these instruction sets. If Intel really wants to push their hardware, why not write such optimizations for the Linux kernel?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
If you'd ask me: it's still a slow piece of crap that has no particular place in the market if it weren't for (consumer) Microsoft Windows being x86-only, and now it's even worse than the original Atom since you get a crappy Intel GPU for free.
In the low-power segment: you are still better of with an ARM chip if you don't need Windows (it consumes less power), another x86 SoC if you absolutely need Windows but don't need anything else (which also consume less power) or a Via Nano if you are a consumer who likes Windows a lot but only do a little browsing and email (they are faster and comparable in terms of power consumption).
In the HTPC/Media center segment: the Atom + Nvidia ION platform was great, low-power/low-performance CPU with a GPU that does all the video decoding and OpenGL. Now you get an Intel GPU that is *still* not able to do full video-pipeline accelerated GPU decoding. Better get yourself an old Atom, or hopefully in the future a Via Nano + decent GPU.
In the Netbook segment: with the performance of the original Atom being nothing but abysmal unless you only use Notepad, you really want a Celeron ULV anyway. It's a much better design, in a whole different performance class than the Atom, and you don't get any of the stupid restrictions Intel puts on using the Atom.
In the embedded segment: you don't need x86 compatibility at all, so ARM would be your 1st choice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see the point of a crippled and slow x86 CPU with a design based on 10-year old technology, which is forcibly coupled to an IGP that isn't able doing much more than rendering your desktop...
Doh! What can you do? I guess I'll just have to wait until I kill this netbook thingy before I upgrade to the delectable do-hickey, with the whatchamacallit... Oh and the thingy-majig... Gotta go spend money... Need new netbook... Mmm.
Holy happy hippy crap!
I'm starting my next term in university and were going to use a program called Orcad to do PCB layout and design and Matlab. Now I'm pretty sure that Matlab would be to much for a netbook but what about PCB design? does any one know if you could use a program like Orcad on a netbook. By far the biggest power horse of a program is Matlab but it's best saved for my desktop anyway.
So, I assume performance-wise this mean going from the equivalent of a 700 MHz P3 to a 1 GHz P3.
Sorry, but truth be told, the balance of performance and power consumption right now favors using the Pentium Dual Cores. The Atom is a niche product that works best with stuff like cash registers.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I believe The Who did that one already.
Wiki says it's 3150; from the in-house Intel line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_3100
And we all know wiki doesn't lie...
One that hath name thou can not otter
That all sounds nice, but have they built a system that draws less power than a comparable Athlon 64 system?
Look again at the bit where it says "battery life"....
In the real world outside Slashdot not everybody is hung up on their 3dMark scores. In fact very few people are, judging by the fact that Intel GPUs outsell both NVIDIA and ATI combined.
No sig today...
I had the original marble
I had a Trackman Marble FX... (the one with the rather large ball). :->
Man I kicked ass in Quake 2 CTF with that thing. Unlike a mouse, it's easy to hold it perfectly still even with huge gain (high mouse speed setting), and then adjust aim with a slight strafe. Makes for good railgunnery. You know you are doing something right when people start calling you a bot.
Who cares about the CPU? Gimme more pixels, preferably non-glossy.
Have people still not figured out that the glossy screens are crap ... or does the magpie syndrome still dominate purchasing decisions?
No sig today...
So do we finally get Linux and Unix distros back in the netbooks instead of XP? Oh God do I hope so.
The world is how you make it
Read the review carefully. While memory performance improved substantially, cpu multimedia gains were marginal and integer performance actually degrade (although just a hair).
The platform is not meant to be a processing powerhouse but to say it showed "a nice performance gain" (implying overall) is a little misleading.
asus: we have a great new product called the 'netbook' that will revolutionize the way people use laptops, and it runs linux!
Microsoft: we can fix that.
asus: oh...well, it still revolutionizes the way people connect to the internet and some day it will support googles os!
intel: we can fix that...
Good people go to bed earlier.
pretty much all of the stuff that happens in a kernel is logic-heavy tasks that only deal with single pieces of data at a time, and thus can't really take advantage of these instructions in any way.
There is one SSEx function which is useful for the kernel, namely, load/store of 128-bit registers for copying and moving memory around.
Windows CE netbooks exist. Windows Mobile, a distribution of CE for PDAs and smartphones, runs just fine on ARM. So I don't see what's stopping a company from putting a Windows-brand operating system on an ARM netbook.
I know own a hammer, that says "designed for Widows XP"
Why run flash at all? Try patronizing sites that support better video technology and maybe even open standards.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Binary compatibility is a non-issue if you're free of Windows.
I am, and it isn't...
I mean, in theory, binary compatibility isn't an issue for me. In practice, when I've tried it, there was always some nice bit of software that was partially coded in IA-32 assembly, or that had platform-specific optimizations - or, like I said before, non-libre software like drivers or whatever for a piece of hardware in my system... Or maybe someone has a nice, closed-source app for Linux and they only build for Intel. Apart from things like critical drivers (video, audio, network) or bits of software like Flash, there's not a lot tying me to the Intel architecture - but I swear, there's always something.
Bow-ties are cool.
The last thing I want is yet another device with GMA graphics on board, and now they're integrating it to the CPU? Thanks but NO THANKS!
So they improved memory bandwidth on a slow CPU that already had more than it needed? Looks like it still gets whooped by a ULV 90nm Pentium-M, let alone a ULV 45nm Core 2 Solo. BTW, let me know when Intel develops an integrated graphics core that can run Half-life 2 as smoothly as a GeForce 2.
> If Intel really wants to push their hardware, why not write such optimizations for the Linux kernel?
Because there's no consumer demand for Linux?
Just a guess, but the numbers bear it out. Linux has a market share below 2%, and has steadily lost more and more users to OSX (and now they can lose to Windows 7 as well- it's teh all about teh choice!).
Meanwhile, Windows' market share has remained pretty steady at around 96%... meaning that most of the OSX "Switch" gains have come from... you guessed it... Linux users.
So given all that, spending money to improve Linux usage seems like either a waste of money, or a vanity project. Either way, Intel would be better off stacking all that money up, and lighting it on fire. At least watching the money burn would provide entertainment.
The linux version will run and look just like a DESKTOP linux machine
Linux for ARM won't run non-free binaries designed for Linux for x86, such as Flash Player. No tube for you.
The GMA500 graphics core was outsourced to another company, as was driver development.
For the record, it's a PowerVR5 core, designed by Imagination Technology. This thing has a near-monopoly in the embed world (specially coupled with ARM chips). It's a distant descendant of the PowerVR2 that powered Sega DreamCast and the PowerVR3 that powered Kyro PC graphic cards. It functions in a radically different maner.
It's not a raster-engine like every single other graphic card (card draws one polygon after another sequentially. multi-GPU is accelerated by either dividing the screen among GPU or having alternate GPUs renreding alternate frames), instead it's Tile-based deffered rendering (remotely reminiscent of ray-tracing : for each pixel on a tile, the GPU determines which of the polygon is visible and only draws that pixel. The method has lower memory, bandwidth and power requirement - thus better suited for the embed/low power environment. And lends itself more easily to parallelization : several core can work each on a separate tile).
Design difference between different chips makes it difficult to just slap some modifications on a given driver and use it with a different hardware(*). Given the radically different design in Tile-rendering, it's even more so. So, although usually Intel pushes strongly in favor of opensource drivers, they couldn't easily re-write their own and open-source them, they had to rely on PowerVR's binaries.
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(*): or used to be so. That's exactly what the new Gallium3D/TTM/DRI2 stack in Linux and BSD, and to some extent WDDM in Windows attempt to mitigate.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You may be able to view youtube via swfdec or gnash.
Which violates how many U.S. patents? Preinstall the open-source H.264 decoder and MPEG-LA could have the netbook stopped at the border. And for SWF objects that happen not to work on swfdec or gnash, whom would the user blame?
My laptop is not too big to lug around. 14", 5lbs. Not bad at all. It is also pretty powerful. 2-3 hours of battery life isn't all that great, but how often do I need to use a laptop for more than 2 hours where there isn't a plug around?
<shrug> I had roughly the same specs with my Powerbook before I got the EEE... Going to conventions was one of its main "mobile" uses for me, playing games and videos and such, or internet usage if I needed info... That was a pretty regular thing for me for a while, and it was more of a "charge when I get back to the hotel room" kind of situation. I also didn't especially like carrying around 5 lbs of laptop all day, it did get to be a drag. I think the EEE is noticeably lighter and even though the battery life is less than double I feel much less dependent upon the AC adapter than I was with the powerbook.
Personally I put a very high value on mobility when it comes to mobile devices. It's no good having the thing be "mobile" if I leave it home, or run out of power too soon.
Bow-ties are cool.