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Blurring Lines — Dual Core Atom To Lift Netbooks
CWmike writes "'The next innovation coming to Atom is on dual-core,' Intel CEO Paul Otellini said recently of the company's low-end chips, which delivered the modern netbook but also found their way into embedded devices, and in the future, into mobile devices like smartphones. His statement comes after close to two years of accelerated growth, and with the initial euphoria around netbooks now subsiding. HP has already advertised a new netbook, the Hewlett-Packard Mini 210, running Intel's upcoming N455 chip, one of the Atom-series processors, on Amazon.de. The N455 supports DDR3 memory, an upgrade over the DDR2 memory in most netbooks today. The DDR3-capable processors should allow data to be exchanged faster between the memory and CPU, translating to better overall netbook performance. Prices of laptops have been falling and the days of netbooks being a novelty have disappeared, said Jay Chou, research analyst at IDC. Laptops are bridging the pricing gap with netbooks, while offering better performance. 'You're getting something really attractive in the $600 range for better-performing notebooks,' Chou said. 'The original intended message of letting people expect netbooks to behave differently or less effectively is not really ringing.'"
I think we are looking at netbooks mostly occupying the place of notebooks and notebooks just about completely replacing desktops. I haven't bought a desktop since Feb 2004 but I have bought three notebooks since then (most recently a Dell Studio 17 this past September).
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Support hardware AES (with your AES-NI instruction set, or even copying VIA's Padlock), then they'll actually be usable in devices used where anyone cares a jot about security.
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."? Computers years ago already passed the good-enough mark for normal usage. The only thing that still drives processors are transcoding and games really. Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine. What do you think this will mean for new computer sales? Will people jump off the upgrade treadmill and simply wait until their current machine dies before purchasing a new one? The inflationary days of selling computing hardware may just be over: now we seem to be getting into a saturated sector. What will manufacturers do to replace those sales?
Shh.
First netbooks had small screens and awesome battery life. Then they made bigger screens, which used more battery. Then they put in larger and larger spinning hard drives, faster processors, and now dual-core?
So we go from a tiny, long-lived netbook to a large (and heavy) powerful and short-lived netbook. Also known as a laptop.
What's next - a high end graphics card so people can play games?
I have one of the early EeePCs - I think it's the 900A - with a 4GB SSD and a 9 inch screen. It runs for at least 5 hours, and depending on the pants I wear it can fit into a cargo pocket. *That's* a netbook.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Apple just released an oversized mobile phone to compete with netbooks, while others ship cheaper laptops. lol
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
For $600, I had better be getting a full-fledged laptop. If it's got more than a 12" screen, or less than 5 hours battery life, or costs more than $400 tops, it's simply not a netbook. Small form factor, long battery life, inexpensive price. That's what defines the netbook market. Or "small laptop", if you want to avoid what is rapidly becoming just a marketing buzzword.
The whole point of a netbook was to use inexpensive and low power commodity hardware.
The dual-core Atom is nice, but I hope they don't lose focus on building low-power, high efficiency processors. It looks like ARM is leading the way in that respect.
Next, they plan to release a dual-engine moped.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
And to think I'm playing TF2 on a single core, i guess i should step it up, thank amd for the am3 socket :D
Wake me when they have V8 option available.
What happened to all the low power ARM netbooks that were supposed to be shipping by now?
Aside from the quite under-whelming AlwaysInnovating thing, there is... what exactly?
I'm currently trying to arrive at a rational, fairly large computer investment in terms of what an individual might pay out. My thinking runs along some blurred lines only because the issues seem to be essentially unclear. Overall, is an individual as a heavy, personal computer user better off making a major long term investment in general computing power in terms of 32 bit architecture and, more or less, disposable units like the dual core, system on a chip, intel Pineview units; or, better off staying with the curve and building 64 bit multi core towers and waiting on the software to catch up to the 64 bit platforms? Say the prospective purchaser is thinking of what a "Beowulf cluster of these" could do. :) I've made an earnest effort to understand PCs as a "power user" since the mid 80's and I think I understand the issues. In terms of software if, today, you were to make a decision to buy either system on a chip 32 bit stuff (or 64 bit SOC stuff running 32 bit software) then 32 bit stuff should be the way to go because of reams of time tested software. I run R and Octave, but like most geeks want to be able to start out with an electronic sketch of an idea and work it, hopefully, up to more abstract but rigorous and formal levels of thought.
More than 5 years ago I frequently said the tower was destined for the basement to share space with water heaters, freezers and furnaces. I still think that's the case. I think every home will have a server, maintained mostly by outside technicians and the house residents will use personal laptop/netbook units.
ideopath @ play
This makes sense, so long as they remain light. I own a netbook, exclusively, because of form factor. Up until recently, I had a 15" Macbook Pro, and liked it a lot. But even at 5.5 pounds -- even with its space-efficient form factor -- it was just too big. I didn't want to carry it with me unless I was travelling long distances for extended periods. So I traded it in, and now I have an HP110 netbook plus a desktop. It's easy to keep my documents synced between them. The netbook is powerful enough for me while I'm on the road (I mostly use it for writing academic-type articles). And for all of my heavy-lifting-type computing, I use the desktop at home. This, to me, is the perfect set-up. So I sincerely hope that netbooks are able to keep up with my needs in terms of portability.
What this article should say is that new lower-power dual-core Atoms are about to be released.
OEMs and chip manufacturers have a large incentive to raise the price of netbooks with quality hardware. Releasing a $100 netbook with dirt cheap hardware and super-low specs would cannabalize their sales and ultimately eat into their profits.
I'm sure we've already discussed this before on Slashdot. What I'm interested in is what happens after this next generation, which will be capable of flawless 1080P playback.
As others have already mentioned, dual-core Atom processors have been out for 2 years, so a dual-core Atom is nothing new.
As regards the support of DDR3 memory, it's unlikely to make any measurable performance difference over DDR2 given the relatively anaemic CPU performance of the Atom. The reason is far more prosaic. DDR3 is now cheaper than DDR2 and that trend will continue so Intel are doing the right thing in moving the chipset support over to the less expensive memory. In a budget platform anything else would be foolish.
Barely had the netbook started hitting the mainstream that they were getting bigger screens, bigger drives, more weight, less battery life, bigger price tag. Most of them very quickly became just crap laptops.
Most of them are seem terrible value. For around 10%-15% more you can get something that at least holds itself to the standard of a low-end laptop, with a much more powerful type of "1.6ghz cpu" and other components yet after a few months the battery life is practically the same. The weight is for all intents and purposes very similar.
Netbooks were good because they were less than two-thirds the price of a laptop, were far more portable (could be forgotten about in a basic satchel), had long batteries. While the spec looked low, general use was actually snappy because it was using SSD and a light OS. You only noticed the performance loss when doing things that actually required decent horsepower (though choppy flash video was a bit of a weakness), which wasn't something you'd want a netbook for anyway.
The summary suggests laptops became cheaper to bridge the gap between them and netbooks. I think it was much more than netbooks turned into laptops.
TVs are a commodity too, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people that heavily research before buying one. Sure, there are people that go into a store and get whatever looks good and is on sale (the vast majority, I'd wager), but most people have been doing that for years with computers too. This is the difference between an enthusiast and a layperson, and the former is not going away anytime soon.
The general trend to keep shoving atom and the general pricing upwards is pure failure.
Acer got it right late last year with DUAL core2s in 11" netbooks, the base model was $400 and ran circles around anything else.
Yet intel et al through OEMs keep trying to flub atom junk past that price point. What gives?
Often with nvidia gpus, anemic cpus with oddball gpu chipset is a terrible combo.
Also partly blame nvidia for not getting newer bus licenses, which is why the hideous future ion configurations appear.
There still is a huge chance for amd to make a proper "netbook" cpu+gpu combo chip that isn't a slow overpriced platform.
I expect MORE cpu AND gpu power in CHEAPER netbooks in 2010, not less. The culvs set the benchmark Q42009 and so far the industry is failing badly.
I remember when the "netbook" was an attempt to create a minimalistic, cheap, long running notebook computer. 200 and you were ready to rock.
Nowadays the only real innovation is "more expensive", "more gadgets", "bigger"... not exactly what I expect from a "netbook"... well, after all the wintel cartel got the netbook totally under control again...
Where is the 150, 500g ARM netbook with an optimized OS running 12 hours without recharge???
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
should be enough for anyone?
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
As regards the support of DDR3 memory, it's unlikely to make any measurable performance difference over DDR2 given the relatively anaemic CPU performance of the Atom. The reason is far more prosaic. DDR3 is now cheaper than DDR2 and that trend will continue so Intel are doing the right thing in moving the chipset support over to the less expensive memory. In a budget platform anything else would be foolish.
Also, memory latency has not improved since regular SDRAM. DDR doubled the throughput, DDR2 doubled it once more, and so on, but the latency has stayed the same. Latency numbers such as CL are roughly doubled at each generation to reflect the roughly constant time, as measured in clock cycles.
On the other hand, successive RAM generations use lower voltages, so there may be some power savings in using DDR3.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What I've heard is that memory isn't the bottleneck in Atom CPPU's. As such, DDR3 really won't improve performance at all -- and is really just a marketing bullet point to charge higher prices with.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The best mobile chip out there-and Apple not only doesn't use it, but they crippled Snow Leopard so it won't work with them.
How DUMB!!
$600 for shit intel video? where is the amd ones?
Amd has much better video chips then Intel gma.
Dual-core Atom CPUs have been around for a while (first the 330, now the 510 chips), the real advance is that now you'll get better performance from DDR3 RAM for integrated graphics and the newer chips support the first low-power support chips.
A dual-core Atom-based system can satisfy many user's needs, when you bake in a discrete graphics option (nVidea ION, for example) it will satisfy many more users, but it will never be, and was never intended to be, the 'only chip you'd ever need'. It is a niche product that got caught up in the home server/media center swell of interest.
Ken
We have two test Point-Of-Sale terminals. One is a 1.6ghz single core Atom, the other is a dual Core 1.6ghz Atom. Both are running WEPOS with 1GB of Ram and the dual core Atom runs the Java based POS app and PostgreSQL 8.4 just as snappy as our Core2Duo machines. The single core machine we notice there is about a 2 second lag when you start a new ticket when running the POS+DB server on the same machine.
Still, the energy usage of the Dual Core Atom is way below the P4 machines they've replaced.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox (with a single tab/window) running their bloated, poorly-coded flash games. This was on a machine that, while not top-of-the-line, is quite adequate for pushing World of Warcraft at a playable framerate
The difference is that World of Warcraft is native, and you may need to be a member of the Administrators group to install native code. Games for Flash Player, on the other hand, work even on a halfway locked-down work PC, so you can play them on break.
The performance of the Intel Atom has been very disappointing. It's fit for a cellular phone, but nothing more. The same price point AMD Athlon 64 whips it ass. About time Intel got with it. In this day and age there's no excuse for such a weak chip.
Are you a sad panda because win98 isn't supported anymore? I'm sorry but there are previous version to be had. Why would you WANT to go and have to download every codec you need individually, end up with a bunch of shit like DivX dumped into your Start>programs, only to still end up not being able to play the content you want? Maybe you find "hunt for a codec" to be a great Where's waldo? adventure, who knows.
For everyone else Ninite is the ultimate unattended installer for the masses. Got a relative having trouble with Flash? Ninite. Grandma could use Firefox but don't know squat? Ninite. Just built a new PC and want all the basics like browser, multimedia, office software, even free AV, and don't want to sit there installing all afternoon? Ninite.
In short for everyone other than useless trolling Anon Cowards (or may I call you Cow?) Ninite just works and is simple enough you can send your grandma there. Oh and all my customers just loooove Klite, as I often get told "make sure I get that media classic thing" when building them new PCs. And considering I am making good money, while you sit in your basement Cow watching Pokemon (do you liek Mudkips?), I think my opinion counts a little more than yours. at least I stand by my posts with my nick, you're afraid to use yours.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
this is incorrect. the speed of memory is very important
for atom because it is an in-order processor. this means
that a cache miss will incur a full memory rtt penalty and
no other microops can complete during this time.
Tell you what. Build a netbook/ipad killer with linux environment, a touch-screen, full media acceleration, ipad form factor, and a dedicated wireless keyboard and pointing device for more traditional apps and uses (and just for grins and giggles put 100-300 GB of solid state storage and peripherals interfaces in the keyboard), and I'm betting you'd pretty much have the convergence platform everybody's been waiting for!!!/p
The biggest reason I haven't upgrade my eee 1000 40G is because there hasn't been anything spectacular to replace it. I'm looking for a SSD machine with a 10" screen above the 1024x600 resolution. It's also got to have at minimum of 6 hours battery life and process things a bit better then my current netbook (video, etc). There should be no heat either, till then I've yet to see a solid reason to upgrade.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
please bring forth a dual core + htt atom, for logical quad :D
and an nvidia gpu + hdmi out. cuda could be especially handy in a netbook, even at the low end
ddr3 memory could potentially make a difference in graphics performance, though. dual vs. single-channel ddr2 memory definitely made a difference with the desktop gma 950 (which atom n4xx graphics is based on), though considering the gpu is clocked lower than the old desktop gma 950 the difference might not be that big. Not that this would really make much of a difference of course compared to modern gpus it will still be very slow.
The Atom processor seems to be exempt from Moore's Law. We should have at least had quad core Atom processors by now.
Forget dual-core, and forget hyperthreading. I just want one core that's reasonably fast without burning through my battery life. Two slow cores that give me four very slow threads is not going to be much help. They only way I'm going to use 4 logical CPUs is if I'm doing some very heavy multitasking, or running heavy number-crunching apps that take advantage of multiple CPUs. That doesn't sound much like a netbook.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
You're getting something really attractive in the $600 range for better-performing notebooks
I'd rather get a really attractive netbook in the $300 range- I am not interested into 'bridging the gap' between netbooks and notebooks.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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I see two penguins when I start up my acer aspire one that I bought two years ago. I see four penguins when I boot up my foxconn atom sytem. Am I missing something or have we had dual and quad core atom for a long time now?
In spite of some good information, you're attempted deameaning attitude has really made you look bad.
Perhaps you should rethink your idea of superiority and remember that the stereotype of basement-dwelling geeks is very outdated and out of sync with the real world.
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Did you even read the post I was responding to? No arguments as to why codec packs may or not be right, no counter to their ease of use. Just "I hate codec packs, fuck off and die". You want respect? You gotta give to receive pal. I have enough karma I could be a total bastard for the next 20 years and not make a dent, but I don't. The only time I let my inner smartass out is when I am either faced with a drooling fanboy, whose answer to any pointed deficiencies in his/her object of sqee is "but but...u sux!" or when I get lame ass trolls who can't even come with with a counter argument, just "I don't like it so it is shit".
So if you have a problem with Klite, please post it, or better yet let the developers know. I have found them to be quite good at fixing reported bugs, they don't bundle toolbars or any of that other douchebag crap we have seen lately from big companies (I am looking at you, Sun) and their codec pack scans the registry upon install and will happily remove any broken dshow links for you, so whether the PC is a fresh install or a 5 year old box, it has a consistent user experience.
But if one wants respect from me, they need to have the balls to stand by their statements and have better arguments than "fuck off and die" or they will get treated like Mr. Cow above. I come to /. to learn new things and have lively discussions with my fellow geeks, not to take shit from those too chickenshit to even stand behind their statements.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It will be a huge increase for a system that uses integrated graphics- which is the one weak point on my 330 system that I use at home.
love is just extroverted narcissism