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Intel's New Atom D510 Benchmark Tested
adeelarshad82 writes "The Atom processor in nettops and netbooks is one of Intel's success stories for 2009. Recently PCMag put the new Intel Atom D510 processor through its paces, to see how it stacks up against previous generation Atom CPUs. Using a whitebox system from Intel, they ran their usual set of benchmark tests on the system. In summary the D510-equipped whitebox finished neck and neck with the dual-core powered Acer R3610-U9012. So while there are differences between the two, if you already have a nettop running the dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor you won't have to upgrade 'just because' there's a new CPU in the wings."
A chip released in 2009 is still on par with a PIII from close to a decade ago?
Although lower power is always nice.
Sent from my PDP-11
Very poor video build in to cpu and no DVI / hdmi?
What a joke VGA can do higher res then digital out on this cpu.
And there is no pci-e x16 bus to add a better video card.
I think that new intel laptop cpus use a faster ver of this carp video system.
Nvidia ion is faster and ion 2 is even faster and what is this half the speed of ion 1?
It sucks.... Major balls... I have an Point Of View Atom 330 motherboard and it's barely usable for common task like surfing, email and word processing. I only tried it using Ubuntu, but I have an ION version so it should compensate for video display. Frankly.... No... It doesn't. Flash video is barely usable, Flash games like Farmville on Facebook are unusable.
I know, I know... the focus is low power, but my Asus EEE 701 4G does better with it's Celeron 900MHz. So saying that it's barely better than an Atom 330 is saying that a Lada is barely better than a Trabant.
I now installed WinXP SP3 on it.... Perhaps it's only a driver issue... Haven't had the time to play around with it.... Perhaps it will be better, perhaps not.
A AMD XP 2400+ with a bit of ram fares much better than any of these motherboards...Yes, except for power management.
The very existence of netbooks and nettops are an admission by the entire industry that the majority of tasks performed by computers these days are served well enough by a "Pentium III", perhaps with the addition of a better GPU than existed back then.
It's confirmation of the old suspicion that computers were becoming TOO powerful for most current uses, that hardware has been advancing quicker than the typical needs of the software. While everyone may benefit from a quad-core 3GHz CPU once in a while, it's not many of us even here that require it every hour of the day (you guys playing Forged Alliance in Mom's converted basement are excepted). It's that "subjective experience" bit all over again: having to wait longer than an instant for something to complete, even just for a few minutes total a day, is the subjective experience that sticks with us, while we conveniently forget the good times that went on the rest of those 24 hours. It's like what they say about it being the little (negative) things that wind up killing marriages.
I don't seem to understand what's the point of a table full of "N/A". If it doesn't apply then why would you put that in a table as a comparison?
From the way you talk, there's no point in selling anything but top of the line i7 or Xeon systems, because who would ever want any of those cheaper, less powerful crappy systems?
No joke. I can live without a full PCI-e bus IF you give me some decent performance I would let it ride. God don't they own Ati?
But this thing? Its DESIGNED to take the Ion and anyone else who wants to make a chipset for it out of the game. Look at the whitepapers here: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/atom/techdocs.htm
There will NEVER be a system, using this chip, with a DVI out neither. Why? The CPU outputs DIRECTLY to VGA. It has a LDVS interface, but it doesn't look like you can split it off for a second display. Maybe as a motherboard but never for the laptop. With the exception of directly connecting it to memory, the only outside interface to the chipset is its "direct media interface", but it looks like the same signaling for PCI-E. One channel.
Thats it. You got a PC with a signle PCI-E slot, were all your USB/Wireless/Ethernet and Hard drive pipe though. They did this to lock down the chip.
All that being said, if they make this chip cheap enough then everything I said is moot. IF the D510 sells for under 299 and the D400's make a 199 laptop, its worth it for the price. But if AMD can get on the ball with their new chip and the ion chipset, they might win this war.
I am a little surprised at how gimped the video options are, not so much because everything needs to be a howling mad game machine; but because Intel had earlier been making noises about trying to become a player in set top boxes(with their CE3100 and CE4100, with the implication that future processors would follow).
It could be that Intel is planning on spinning a STB variant of these new Atoms, or some upcoming equivalent, with video that doesn't suck, and they prefer to keep the two separate(perhaps to preserve the margins on core2s?)
For my purposes, I find these pleasing because they will, once Intel pumps out their inevitable reference mini-ITX or smaller boards, make it really easy to produce cheap, energy efficient, and fairly powerful network and storage appliances. ARM is arguably superior for the purpose; but, as a hobbyist, I appreciate being able to buy, in quantities of one, reasonably embeddable boards that will also boot stock debian just as easily as any normal PC will.
Although performance is no better, the new chip sips power. That will lead to longer life or cheaper batteries. Win.
I care a bit. A little bit.
What I care more about, though, is if it can even come close to ARM CPUs in power per watt ratio. (Atom fanboys: First add the giant north bridge monster to your calculations before you answer. ^^)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Unless it can run 1080p video from a software renderer, and also have an antivirus scan going in the background, it's too slow. Don't get me wrong, I love my netbook, but the slowdowns, and stuttering on even lower-rez video gets annoying (youtube/hulu/netflix). It just isn't enough. I kind of like the 10" form factor for portability, though will probably go up to a 12-13" laptop next time around for a bit faster CPU, maybe an SU7300 or something similar. In the server space, the biggest limitation is motherboards supporting 4+ sata drives with an atom. I could see an atom running software raid for a 4-6 drive nas box. I think it's still under powered for anything that will serve DLNA/uPnP video. It's underpowered (even with ION) for media center chores, where ARM tends to run better and cost less. I can get a roku HD box for less than one of these would cost with a case, psu, memory etc.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
VIA has their Nano 3000 series.
Anyone knows how well (or bad) the VIA Nano 3000 stack against Intel Atom?
Any comparison / shootout done by any website?
Anyone?
Frankly to the detriment of my own business I have done more repair and upgrade than new builds. I'm a bit too honest for my own good I guess, but I just don't see the point in telling a customer that the upgrade they think they need could be achieved through more ram or a better video card. There are some exceptions of course but mostly heavy gamers or those into audio/video stuff. I used to upgrade every 6-8 months, but my main desktop I have had for going on 3 years. In fact the only machines I have had for personal use since that upgrade have been more toys to play with like the dual atom mini desktop im typing on now, its plenty sufficient for email and web use and the whole thing cost less than $300.
You want to add a PCIe video card to an atom system? WTF? Do you also want to fit a racing spoiler on your Smart Car? This is a low power chip. It is designed for efficient systems that doesn't do a whole lot, like netbooks. It is not designed for gaming. If you want a system with external graphics Intel makes a chip for that too. You hay have heard of a little thing called the Core 2, which is available in desktop and mobile versions, is fast as hell, and uses external graphics.
1) Supermicro has two Atom based "server" motherboards. They have 1 PCI, 1 8xPCI-E, and 1 4xPCI-E in a 8xPCI-E form. Dual gigabit nics.
2) I've got a Zotac ION-F-E + Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8I with 8 Seagate Momentus laptop drives. The L8I is not being used as a raid controller. It's just an 8 drive jbod. Running OpenSolaris + ZFS, it easily provides 95 MB/s streaming throughput. From an IOPS perspective, 4k random synch writes it does 600. And draws an entire 60 watts when under load. If you didn't want to go with an ION/SAS solution, you can but the Intel Atom board for around $75 and buy the SATA controller of your choice.
3) The Zotac ION C right next to it is fanless. With VDPAU it plays 1080p video with zero stuttering and a CPU utilization of 10%.
An Atom isn't any kind of big time number cruncher. But it's more than capable of handling NAS duties on a smallish SOHO network (5-10 simultaneous users easily.) If you pair it with Nvidia's ION chipset, it'll serve HTPC duties just fine as well.
Indeed, that's the case now for the most part. The last two upgrades I've had (laptop & desktop) have been because the prior one broke. While it's nicer to be able to render something in 15 seconds vs 60, it's still long enough that there's a definite gap. (Also, 15 seconds is in some ways more annoying, because at a minute, you are free to do something else, 15 seconds isn't enough time to finish much of anything.)
$ uptime
17:04:37 up 3 days, 7:03, 0 users, load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.01
$ cpufreq-info | grep "cpufreq stats"
cpufreq stats: 2.40 GHz:1.97%, 2.13 GHz:0.03%, 1.87 GHz:0.04%, 1.60 GHz:97.97% (302491)
cpufreq stats: 2.40 GHz:2.11%, 2.13 GHz:0.02%, 1.87 GHz:0.03%, 1.60 GHz:97.84% (254077)
cpufreq stats: 2.40 GHz:2.18%, 2.13 GHz:0.02%, 1.87 GHz:0.02%, 1.60 GHz:97.78% (203704)
cpufreq stats: 2.40 GHz:1.15%, 2.13 GHz:0.01%, 1.87 GHz:0.01%, 1.60 GHz:98.83% (118501)
$
(load the 'cpufreq_stats' module to have the cpufreq-info utility display these stats)
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Look at the picture of this board. Unlike typical atom330+945gc nettop board it has NO FAN. And if we recall the fact that 945gc chipset consumes 25w of power, way more than 8w cpu itself, I would rather call this board "Nettop ATOM board done right, powerwise". So if you already have netbook which uses 945gse mobile chipset(which is already power efficient), this would mean nothing more than minor facelift. But if you're going to buy atom330+945gc itx nettop board, this is much improved product to consider regarding power. And minor upgrade from gma950 to gma3150(slightly improved g31), would be better than nothing.
The main benefit of the new Atom platform is its improved efficiency.
More info at:
Intel's next-gen Atom arrives in Asus' Eee PC 1005PE netbook
http://techreport.com/articles.x/18167
"Pine Trail's pseudo-system-on-chip architecture is quite a departure from the first Atom platform and an impressive achievement for Intel. Not only has the company managed to drop the number of chips and dramatically reduce the platform's footprint, but it has also lowered power consumption by a healthy margin. Those improvements should make it easier for manufacturers to churn out slimmer and lighter netbooks with better battery life than ever before."
Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3692
"First, new vs. old Atom. With a real world performance improvement approaching 10% on the desktop, I'm happy with the performance of Pine Trail. Short of Intel introducing a brand new architecture, Atom isn't going to get much better, so the fact that we're getting anything is worth being happy about.
The impact of the on-die memory controller is noticeable on overall system performance. As I said earlier, my Pine Trail testbed was snappier and more responsive than my older Atom machines. It's by no means fast, but it's noticeably faster than before.
Power consumption is also much improved thanks to Intel ditching the archaic 945 chipset. Although the impact on battery life in netbooks is going to be more exciting than drawing less power at the wall. Pine Trail is worth waiting for."
ASUS Eee PC 1005PE: Pineview Arrives
http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3693
"The latest release of Atom brings quite a few changes, but the net result isn't quite as impressive as we were hoping. We have an integrated memory controller in the CPU along with a GPU on package. Those are cost saving measures that also provide some benefits in terms of power requirements. What they apparently don't provide is a significant improvement in performance. Anand saw around a 10% improvement in performance relative to Diamondville on the desktop, but the real problem is what we didn't get.
Specifically, Pineview needed a lot more than GMA 3150 to make it attractive. Given a choice between N280 ION and N450 Pineview, ION will offer a better overall experience for the vast majority of users. If you want to do a silent HTPC, Pineview is going to need some form of external graphics, making the GMA 3150 a waste of space. We would have been much happier if Intel had included GMA 4500 instead, and even then it would be underpowered compared to ION."
Actually the entire design is marketing enforced, everything smells of we try to kill ION in its infancy. Atom itself had the potential to impact the desktop sales of NVidias more powerful processors by simply attaching a decent graphics card on their utter garbage the Atom in fact really is. (Atom is a wannabe ARM which needs ten times the power of a similar specced ARM)
Intel tried to kill ION over illegal pricing structures the last months and now they are doing it the legal way by simply cutting off the cords ION was attached to.
If one platform screams for decent graphics coprocessors it definitely is the netbooks, and Intel tries to hamper that as much as possible by shutting out the only vendor who delivers such a combination! (for now, NVidia already is working with Via to bring the ION to the via processors and its ARM combo already is underway and used by some)
Well, I guess different people do have different needs...
~> uptime
11:00am up 524 days 2:23, 0 users, load average: 1.08, 1.02, 1.01
~> mpstat -P ALL
(REDACTED)
11:03:16 AM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
11:03:16 AM all 1.00 51.04 0.57 0.18 0.02 0.02 0.00 47.18 392.80
11:03:16 AM 0 1.15 26.71 0.42 0.26 0.01 0.01 0.00 71.44 173.44
11:03:16 AM 1 1.55 54.85 0.64 0.36 0.03 0.04 0.00 42.53 141.12
11:03:16 AM 2 0.67 55.64 0.57 0.05 0.00 0.00 0.00 43.06 0.09
11:03:16 AM 3 0.63 66.97 0.63 0.04 0.03 0.04 0.00 31.66 78.16
Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power Looking for the price of this board on the internet I found it at http://www.mini-box.com/D510MO-mini-ITX-Intel, and the price is not bad :).
With a proper miniITX enclosure and Broadcom Cristal HD miniPCI card it would be a nice fanless and silent HTPC for my living room.
"Intel tried to kill ION over illegal pricing structures the last months and now they are doing it the legal way"
Those BASTARDS! Attempting to kill their competitor's product legally? Will they stop at nothing?
Intel has a new Atom-specific chipset and there are some interesting motherboards out now, esp. Supermicro's X7SPA-7HF with the latest Atom D510 CPU, Intel ICH-9R chipset with 6 on-board SATA ports, dual DDR2 SoDIMMs (supporting 4 Gigs of RAM), dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports and a PCI Express x4 (in a PCI Express x16 slot):
http://supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H&IPMI=Y