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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."
Lower power, lower cost, bigger L2.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
As the previous posted said, use Flash 10.1. The hardware acceleration makes a huge difference. Before using the "beta" version Flash was practically unusable.
I have a Atom 330 with nVidia ION as well, and it can decode 720p H.264 video just fine (about 10-20% CPU usage in media player classic, or 30-40% with Flash). Haven't tried 1080p, but I'd suspect it works okay too. I'm using Win7, but I'd suspect that shouldn't make a difference.
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.
Fine, you stick with x86. But I'm looking forwards to the ARM netbooks, but I might wait for the A9 ones. I don't need massive about amount of CPU, just enough to play HD video comfortably. I don't need x86. ARM Linux runs what I'm running now, I can see it in the repositories. If there is something I really want that doesn't run on ARM, I'll look at porting it as a project. Which is part of the joy of open source and why so much is already cross platform. On both the netbook and desktop, you install software from the repository for, so binary compatibility doesn't matter.