I'm personally crossing my fingers for ARM SoCs based on the Cortex core to show up in MID/UMPCs before Intel gets Moorestown out the door. Cortex should be good enough in the performance department for most tasks one would use a handheld for, and should have a quite decent advantage in power consumption.
In this corner, we have the mean lean LinARM. While not the fastest contender out there, boy does he have stamina. Some claim that his Finnish ancestry will cause language problems, but others think that it is a non-issue.
In the other corner, we have the current heavy-weight champion Wintel. After his recent diet, does he have what it takes to take home the title in the flyweight division or will the Windows tax on his shoulders make him too sluggish?
And since when isn't the platform a required part of a computer?
I didn't say that it wasn't. What got my knickers in a twist was "Nano beats Intel Atom", when "Atom let down by power-pig chipset" would be a more accurate description.
It's Intel's fault that they're pairing a 4W CPU with a 22W chipset
Absolutely. The only reason I can think of for Intel to require mobo makers to use the 945 is that they can produce them for cheap and want to make as much money as possible on the platform. The Atom 2x0 should work fine on pretty much any chipset that supports a 533 FSB, so it is really inexcusable for Intel to bundle this CPU that delivers 3+ times the performance per watt than the Nano with a chipset that is pretty much the opposite.
Both ooo and smt are techniques to avoid putting NOPs in the pipeline.
In ooo, it is "Instruction x+1 needs the result of instruction x before it can execute, so it can't enter the pipeline earlier than n ticks after instruction x. Let's re-order the instructions so that we can put useful instructions in that gap instead of issuing nops".
smt is "Instruction x+1 in thread 1 needs to wait n ticks, let's fill that gap in the pipeline with instructions from thread 2 instead".
Both needs the logic to understand how long instruction x+1 needs to wait after instruction x was put in the pipeline, but if you do smt only you do not need the instruction reorder logic.
I'm not a cpu designer so I have no idea how many gates are needed for the instruction reorder logic, but it seems Intel decided to do smt only.
Yeah, the chipset issue is important and is currently the big missing piece in the puzzle if Intel wants to get into the UMP / high end cell phone game. Complete ARM SoCs that include CPU, USB, 2D/3D acceleration, SD-card interface, memory controller, on-chip RAM, camera interface with JPEG/MPEG-4 encoder and perhaps even a kitchen sink use about as much watts as the Atom CPU alone.
It is even an issue on the desktop. In that "benchmark" they used a 945G chipset motherboard. That chipset pulls 20+W, which is kind of silly when matched with a 4W CPU. The only reason that the Nano eked out a slight win in work per watt was because of the high power draw of the other components of the PCs; even replacing that Raptor HD with a laptop HD would have put the Atom on top.
Replace the Raptor HD with a laptop HD, and the Atom suddenly comes out on top. Not to mention that their "benchmark" ignores that most PCs spend a lot of time at idle; those numbers are only valid if you power on - encode mp3s - power off.
Atom is not designed for the desktop, it is too slow for that. It is designed for laptops and subnotebooks where power efficiency is more important than speed. Not to mention that the 945G chipset in that Atom PC they built is not exactly low power - 20+W.
Speaking of the 35xx, check out Pandora for one example of what people are building with that chip. Heck, even last generation's OMAP2420 had enough oomph to run Linux with acceptable performance (Nokia N800/N810) and the 35xx is expected to be about 4x the speed.
Unless Intel gets their act together soon with Moorestown, they might find that the UMP market is eaten by Cortex-based ARM SoCs; at least the part of the market where x86 compatibility isn't important. One can at least hope, the Cortex certainly has enough performance for most tasks one would want to do with a handheld.
It does make a difference because the benchmark claims that it compares performance per watt. If you compare the CPUs only, the Atom is 3+ times more efficient; the more power-guzzling components you add to the two test systems, the more you hide that fact.
Take the "Nano is 3% better at mp3 encoding" claim. Replace that Raptor with a 2W laptop harddisk and suddenly the Atom is better.
That Raptor is not quite that bad - 9W at idle-but-spinning and 10W at read/write. Still, that's 7-8W more than a decent laptop drive.
Not to mention that the i945G chipset in the Atom PC is something like 20+W. The Nano motherboard idle power seems a bit high too.
If the goal of the benchmark was to test the limits of performance per watt on the two platforms, the choices they made seems silly. All the benchmark really shows is that it makes no sense to put an efficient engine in a heavy suv.
Yeah, it almost seems like they deliberately picked high power-consumption motherboards (and what is that high-performance 9W-at-idle Raptor doing in there?). The only thing this benchmark shows is that it is silly to put a low-power CPU in a PC that has no other low-power components.
Well, that review also shows that the Atom is simply not a good choice for your average desktop so you are at least half-way right. For some strange reason Intel is making Atom + i945G chipset systems, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Whatever you save in wattage on using the Atom is eaten instantly by that ancient power-guzzling chipset.
Atom, when finally paired with a decent low-power chipset and other system components (SSD/laptop HD, low-power RAM, etc), will have no problems beating the Nano in performance per watt. But that 3+ higher performance/watt advantage it has over the Nano is currently hidden by putting it on motherboards that are not designed for power efficiency.
Intel is probably doing it to cash in on the current Atom hype, but it really makes me cringe inside; it is like putting an efficient low-power high MPG engine in a SUV made of lead.
But that is only because they decided to fill their test PCs with powerpig components. If the benchmark was intended to compare low-power Nano and Atom PCs, they did it all wrong.
For example, the 945G chipset is like 20+W. They stuck a 9+W-at-idle high performance HD in there, instead of something like a 1W-3W laptop drive. It is like the entire benchmark was set up to mask the fact that the Atom is 3+ times better than the Nano in performance per watt.
Actually, the only thing that this benchmark proves is that putting a hyper-efficient Atom CPU in a PC which has power-guzzling components like the 945G (20+ watts, for crying out loud!) is silly if your goal is to get good performance per watt.
That number is misleading. It compares the complete platform instead of looking at the CPUs in isolation, and it also ignores power consumption at idle.
Compared to the Atom system, the Nano based system use 2.8W more (5%) when idle and 17.4W (29%) more when under load.
The Nano is roughly 30% faster than the Atom.
Which means that if you power on the system, encode a bunch of MP3s and then instantly powers the system down then the Nano-based PC will use slightly less total power than the Atom-based PC.
However, most PCs spend a considerable time at idle - most of us don't turn the PC off when the CPU load is less than 100%. And since the Nano PC use more Watts than the Atom PC at idle....
If we compare the CPUs only, the Atom completely crushes the Nano; it is more than 3 times better in terms of performance per watt. The only reason that the PCper benchmark shows them as roughly equivalent is that the rest of the components used in the PCs are watt-guzzling hogs. Once Intel comes out with decent low-power chipsets for the Atom (as opposed to that 945G that consumes a silly 20+W), the Nano will not compare so favourably any more.
Yeah, the Atom itself is perfectly fine; in terms of performance per watt they are even in the ballpark of the ARM cores you find in most cell phones and other low-powered devices. What is missing for the Atom to enter that space is that an equally watt-efficient chipset and other components are not there yet.
That is an uphill battle for Intel, as the ARM manufacturers have long experience in making low-power complete systems - typically by putting the cpu core, RAM, memory controller, 2D/3D, USB, SD and all the other glue on a single chip.
Atom doesn't pull 20W at idle, TDP on the Atom cpu in that benchmark is afaik ~4W. Which means that pretty much all of that power drawn at idle is from the rest of the board.
One of the major culprits would be the i945 chipset, which comes in at about 20W. The rest would be RAM, disks, etc.
If we only look at the CPUs, notice that the Nano pulls about 5 times more wattage than the Atom but only manages to be 20-30% faster.
What this benchmark really shows is that putting a low-wattage CPU in a system is kinda silly if the other components in the system are watt-guzzling pigs.
It also means that a total system with an Atom and proper low-power chipset/ram/etc will draw about 16W less than a Nano paired with the same low-power components. Which means that the Nano simply can't be used in MIDs, while the Atom will do quite fine in that form factor when Intel gets a decent low-power north/southbridge out the door.
Let me guess. You just ordered one and are trying to justify it?
Honestly, this 2 GB of RAM is much needed these days.
Which games? Show me at least a single benchmark that shows that a current 1GB card is short on ram on game settings that a 4850 can realistically run at.
"Great, my video card I have enough video ram to run this game at top settings but the gpu is too slow to give me a decent framerate".
That some (*cough*many*cough*) of you automatically insult people who would buy this wreaks of ignorance, jealousy, pomposity, and an attempt to justify your own languid situation.
No, we are pointing out what should be blindingly obvious; this card isn't balanced. It is like a PC with 2GB ram and a Pentium 75.
Though recently I have changed over to a WRT54GL with Tomato. Best router hardware and software combo I have seen.
I'd second that. Stable, good UI, easy QOS. Short of building a box yourself from old parts or something like a soekris it is probably the best option out there. Doesn't cost much more than an el'cheapo home router either.
On that note, I really wish someone like Linksys would come out with an updated model. A bit more ram and flash, slightly faster cpu, a few usb ports and a pots. Make it Linux-friendly and you could turn it into everything from an asterix server to a mini-nas in addition to doing all the router/wifi stuff. You can build your own from parts, but a mass-market model could get the price down a bit.
I didn't expect a feature complete KDE4.0, but that is because I actually read the announcements by the KDE team.
Aye, there's the rub.
Everybody sees the version number, but only those that read the KDE announcement understood that "4.0" really meant "not at all finished yet".
In the rest of the world "x.0" means ready for end-users, but somehow the KDE team still fails to understand that and gets all "Dude, we said it in the release announcement. Ain't our fault that people think x.0 means finished product even if that's how the rest of the world does it. Really, it is the world that is at fault for not reading the announcement. We decided to call it 4.0 so that more people would install it and reporting bugs and developing for it and stuff, and then people like installed it and for some reason got angry at us because it wasn't really finished but we told them that in the announcement so we really don't understand why people got so angry about it".
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I'm personally crossing my fingers for ARM SoCs based on the Cortex core to show up in MID/UMPCs before Intel gets Moorestown out the door. Cortex should be good enough in the performance department for most tasks one would use a handheld for, and should have a quite decent advantage in power consumption.
In this corner, we have the mean lean LinARM. While not the fastest contender out there, boy does he have stamina. Some claim that his Finnish ancestry will cause language problems, but others think that it is a non-issue.
In the other corner, we have the current heavy-weight champion Wintel. After his recent diet, does he have what it takes to take home the title in the flyweight division or will the Windows tax on his shoulders make him too sluggish?
I stand corrected (but in my defence, it was only for a short time though).
And since when isn't the platform a required part of a computer?
I didn't say that it wasn't. What got my knickers in a twist was "Nano beats Intel Atom", when "Atom let down by power-pig chipset" would be a more accurate description.
It's Intel's fault that they're pairing a 4W CPU with a 22W chipset
Absolutely. The only reason I can think of for Intel to require mobo makers to use the 945 is that they can produce them for cheap and want to make as much money as possible on the platform. The Atom 2x0 should work fine on pretty much any chipset that supports a 533 FSB, so it is really inexcusable for Intel to bundle this CPU that delivers 3+ times the performance per watt than the Nano with a chipset that is pretty much the opposite.
Both ooo and smt are techniques to avoid putting NOPs in the pipeline.
In ooo, it is "Instruction x+1 needs the result of instruction x before it can execute, so it can't enter the pipeline earlier than n ticks after instruction x. Let's re-order the instructions so that we can put useful instructions in that gap instead of issuing nops".
smt is "Instruction x+1 in thread 1 needs to wait n ticks, let's fill that gap in the pipeline with instructions from thread 2 instead".
Both needs the logic to understand how long instruction x+1 needs to wait after instruction x was put in the pipeline, but if you do smt only you do not need the instruction reorder logic.
I'm not a cpu designer so I have no idea how many gates are needed for the instruction reorder logic, but it seems Intel decided to do smt only.
Yeah, the chipset issue is important and is currently the big missing piece in the puzzle if Intel wants to get into the UMP / high end cell phone game. Complete ARM SoCs that include CPU, USB, 2D/3D acceleration, SD-card interface, memory controller, on-chip RAM, camera interface with JPEG/MPEG-4 encoder and perhaps even a kitchen sink use about as much watts as the Atom CPU alone.
It is even an issue on the desktop. In that "benchmark" they used a 945G chipset motherboard. That chipset pulls 20+W, which is kind of silly when matched with a 4W CPU. The only reason that the Nano eked out a slight win in work per watt was because of the high power draw of the other components of the PCs; even replacing that Raptor HD with a laptop HD would have put the Atom on top.
Replace the Raptor HD with a laptop HD, and the Atom suddenly comes out on top. Not to mention that their "benchmark" ignores that most PCs spend a lot of time at idle; those numbers are only valid if you power on - encode mp3s - power off.
Atom is not designed for the desktop, it is too slow for that. It is designed for laptops and subnotebooks where power efficiency is more important than speed. Not to mention that the 945G chipset in that Atom PC they built is not exactly low power - 20+W.
Speaking of the 35xx, check out Pandora for one example of what people are building with that chip. Heck, even last generation's OMAP2420 had enough oomph to run Linux with acceptable performance (Nokia N800/N810) and the 35xx is expected to be about 4x the speed.
Unless Intel gets their act together soon with Moorestown, they might find that the UMP market is eaten by Cortex-based ARM SoCs; at least the part of the market where x86 compatibility isn't important. One can at least hope, the Cortex certainly has enough performance for most tasks one would want to do with a handheld.
It does make a difference because the benchmark claims that it compares performance per watt. If you compare the CPUs only, the Atom is 3+ times more efficient; the more power-guzzling components you add to the two test systems, the more you hide that fact.
Take the "Nano is 3% better at mp3 encoding" claim. Replace that Raptor with a 2W laptop harddisk and suddenly the Atom is better.
That Raptor is not quite that bad - 9W at idle-but-spinning and 10W at read/write. Still, that's 7-8W more than a decent laptop drive.
Not to mention that the i945G chipset in the Atom PC is something like 20+W. The Nano motherboard idle power seems a bit high too.
If the goal of the benchmark was to test the limits of performance per watt on the two platforms, the choices they made seems silly. All the benchmark really shows is that it makes no sense to put an efficient engine in a heavy suv.
Yeah, it almost seems like they deliberately picked high power-consumption motherboards (and what is that high-performance 9W-at-idle Raptor doing in there?). The only thing this benchmark shows is that it is silly to put a low-power CPU in a PC that has no other low-power components.
Well, that review also shows that the Atom is simply not a good choice for your average desktop so you are at least half-way right. For some strange reason Intel is making Atom + i945G chipset systems, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Whatever you save in wattage on using the Atom is eaten instantly by that ancient power-guzzling chipset.
Atom, when finally paired with a decent low-power chipset and other system components (SSD/laptop HD, low-power RAM, etc), will have no problems beating the Nano in performance per watt. But that 3+ higher performance/watt advantage it has over the Nano is currently hidden by putting it on motherboards that are not designed for power efficiency.
Intel is probably doing it to cash in on the current Atom hype, but it really makes me cringe inside; it is like putting an efficient low-power high MPG engine in a SUV made of lead.
But that is only because they decided to fill their test PCs with powerpig components. If the benchmark was intended to compare low-power Nano and Atom PCs, they did it all wrong.
For example, the 945G chipset is like 20+W. They stuck a 9+W-at-idle high performance HD in there, instead of something like a 1W-3W laptop drive. It is like the entire benchmark was set up to mask the fact that the Atom is 3+ times better than the Nano in performance per watt.
Actually, the only thing that this benchmark proves is that putting a hyper-efficient Atom CPU in a PC which has power-guzzling components like the 945G (20+ watts, for crying out loud!) is silly if your goal is to get good performance per watt.
That number is misleading. It compares the complete platform instead of looking at the CPUs in isolation, and it also ignores power consumption at idle.
Compared to the Atom system, the Nano based system use 2.8W more (5%) when idle and 17.4W (29%) more when under load.
The Nano is roughly 30% faster than the Atom.
Which means that if you power on the system, encode a bunch of MP3s and then instantly powers the system down then the Nano-based PC will use slightly less total power than the Atom-based PC.
However, most PCs spend a considerable time at idle - most of us don't turn the PC off when the CPU load is less than 100%. And since the Nano PC use more Watts than the Atom PC at idle....
If we compare the CPUs only, the Atom completely crushes the Nano; it is more than 3 times better in terms of performance per watt. The only reason that the PCper benchmark shows them as roughly equivalent is that the rest of the components used in the PCs are watt-guzzling hogs. Once Intel comes out with decent low-power chipsets for the Atom (as opposed to that 945G that consumes a silly 20+W), the Nano will not compare so favourably any more.
Nope. Green and red apples would be more like it.
For most intents and purposes, AMD64 and EM64T is the same instruction set. You are probably thinking of IA64 (Itanium).
Or Centaur WinChip, rather. VIA bought Cyrix too, but from what I remember they never manufactured any if the Cyrix CPUs.
Yeah, the Atom itself is perfectly fine; in terms of performance per watt they are even in the ballpark of the ARM cores you find in most cell phones and other low-powered devices. What is missing for the Atom to enter that space is that an equally watt-efficient chipset and other components are not there yet.
That is an uphill battle for Intel, as the ARM manufacturers have long experience in making low-power complete systems - typically by putting the cpu core, RAM, memory controller, 2D/3D, USB, SD and all the other glue on a single chip.
Atom doesn't pull 20W at idle, TDP on the Atom cpu in that benchmark is afaik ~4W. Which means that pretty much all of that power drawn at idle is from the rest of the board.
One of the major culprits would be the i945 chipset, which comes in at about 20W. The rest would be RAM, disks, etc.
If we only look at the CPUs, notice that the Nano pulls about 5 times more wattage than the Atom but only manages to be 20-30% faster.
What this benchmark really shows is that putting a low-wattage CPU in a system is kinda silly if the other components in the system are watt-guzzling pigs.
It also means that a total system with an Atom and proper low-power chipset/ram/etc will draw about 16W less than a Nano paired with the same low-power components. Which means that the Nano simply can't be used in MIDs, while the Atom will do quite fine in that form factor when Intel gets a decent low-power north/southbridge out the door.
How so?
The EU got their very own version of the DMCA anti-circumvention law several years ago. See 2001/29/EC Article 6.
And?
You might want to re-read the post you replied to.
*whoosh*
Let me guess. You just ordered one and are trying to justify it?
Honestly, this 2 GB of RAM is much needed these days.
Which games? Show me at least a single benchmark that shows that a current 1GB card is short on ram on game settings that a 4850 can realistically run at.
"Great, my video card I have enough video ram to run this game at top settings but the gpu is too slow to give me a decent framerate".
That some (*cough*many*cough*) of you automatically insult people who would buy this wreaks of ignorance, jealousy, pomposity, and an attempt to justify your own languid situation.
No, we are pointing out what should be blindingly obvious; this card isn't balanced. It is like a PC with 2GB ram and a Pentium 75.
Though recently I have changed over to a WRT54GL with Tomato. Best router hardware and software combo I have seen.
I'd second that. Stable, good UI, easy QOS. Short of building a box yourself from old parts or something like a soekris it is probably the best option out there. Doesn't cost much more than an el'cheapo home router either.
On that note, I really wish someone like Linksys would come out with an updated model. A bit more ram and flash, slightly faster cpu, a few usb ports and a pots. Make it Linux-friendly and you could turn it into everything from an asterix server to a mini-nas in addition to doing all the router/wifi stuff. You can build your own from parts, but a mass-market model could get the price down a bit.
Must you upgrade to v1.20?
I'd say YES
"* Updated to dnsmasq 2.43. This takes care of the CERT VU#800113 security issue."
I didn't expect a feature complete KDE4.0, but that is because I actually read the announcements by the KDE team.
Aye, there's the rub.
Everybody sees the version number, but only those that read the KDE announcement understood that "4.0" really meant "not at all finished yet".
In the rest of the world "x.0" means ready for end-users, but somehow the KDE team still fails to understand that and gets all "Dude, we said it in the release announcement. Ain't our fault that people think x.0 means finished product even if that's how the rest of the world does it. Really, it is the world that is at fault for not reading the announcement. We decided to call it 4.0 so that more people would install it and reporting bugs and developing for it and stuff, and then people like installed it and for some reason got angry at us because it wasn't really finished but we told them that in the announcement so we really don't understand why people got so angry about it".