You know, I'm a little disappointed in the [H]. That "Here, do whatever you want" statement would be the perfect excuse to overclock the crap out of it! You know, like the good ol' days of "OC till it breaks". Its been a while since an article where a CPU was physically destroyed from OCing (4.2ghz P4 is the last I remember...)
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Intel Atom vs.VIA Nano @ [H]
- Thread starter FrgMstr
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You know, I'm a little disappointed in the [H]. That "Here, do whatever you want" statement would be the perfect excuse to overclock the crap out of it! You know, like the good ol' days of "OC till it breaks". Its been a while since an article where a CPU was physically destroyed from OCing (4.2ghz P4 is the last I remember...)
I still dont see the point in the review.
Atom is currently crippled powerwise by the chipset. Poulsbo will be out soon which will fix that, which is why Via probably wanted the testing done now, before Poulsbo hits and then people start doing reviews versus Nano.
I still believe that if people want the lowest power draw they will go with Poulsbo/Atom
If they want low power draw and some performance they will go with a low power celeron.
The idle and full load for a Via nano was 43/53Watts
The idle and full load for a Intel 220 is approx 45/55Watts
But the 220 should "just" beat the nano or be very close. I believe this would have been a fairer comparisonment
Atom is currently crippled powerwise by the chipset. Poulsbo will be out soon which will fix that, which is why Via probably wanted the testing done now, before Poulsbo hits and then people start doing reviews versus Nano.
I still believe that if people want the lowest power draw they will go with Poulsbo/Atom
If they want low power draw and some performance they will go with a low power celeron.
The idle and full load for a Via nano was 43/53Watts
The idle and full load for a Intel 220 is approx 45/55Watts
But the 220 should "just" beat the nano or be very close. I believe this would have been a fairer comparisonment
Great review as allways. Just one thing was nagging me.
I think there was note of this in an earlier post but I didn't see an answer from Kyle. I tried to at least skim the posts, but there are 3 pages and I'm at work so I might have missed it.
On your power page, you noted the intel has lower draw, and on your GPU tests, it is slower, doing the math, it would seem the drain on your battery for discrete tasks is lower for the Via. (Watts*seconds = Joules)
Of course I see the obivous flaw in such thinking, as if you were to try to game on one of these there would be 100% draw for as long as you play your game, while you would see a higher fps, you would still kill your battery faster.
I looked through the article to see if there was any mention of this but all I found was this:
I think there was note of this in an earlier post but I didn't see an answer from Kyle. I tried to at least skim the posts, but there are 3 pages and I'm at work so I might have missed it.
On your power page, you noted the intel has lower draw, and on your GPU tests, it is slower, doing the math, it would seem the drain on your battery for discrete tasks is lower for the Via. (Watts*seconds = Joules)
Of course I see the obivous flaw in such thinking, as if you were to try to game on one of these there would be 100% draw for as long as you play your game, while you would see a higher fps, you would still kill your battery faster.
I looked through the article to see if there was any mention of this but all I found was this:
2G I assume? If it was a 4G, I'm confused. Try again with nLite + 1GB or more of RAM. Web browsing and Office does not bog down a 600 (or 900 MHz with EEECtrl) Celeron. These tasks certainly don't bog down my EEE 4G with Windows.
It was a 16G. Basically they took the 20G, which was a 4GB + 16GB SSD (the 4gb being of reasonable speed, the 16 being the slow tanker for stuff), and decided they'd make it more friendly to the mass market (purchased it at Best Buy) by using only the 16GB so users would only have a "C:" drive.
Something isn't right when it takes 5 hours to install MS Office, and 2-3 minutes per click on a web page. I tried moving web cache to a ram disk, virtual memory to a ramdisk, etc, but it was to no avail. This was running Windows XP Home - the only WAF approved OS at this time. I'd take a Pentium II 400 with 128mb of RAM over the particular Eee that I had (I think it was a 901).
If I ordered the 12G online (4+8gb), it probably would have been a viable lappy.
One of the reasons i am looking at the HD versions is that there is nothing "new" in that part of the tech, and the power drain difference seems to be negligible.
EEE seems to be slightly leading considering how "easy" it seems to be not only to upgrade, but just to transform, even for someone like me.
That plus it seems there are more outside battery makers for it, so there should be more of a chance at seeing a 9cell or even better for it
EEE seems to be slightly leading considering how "easy" it seems to be not only to upgrade, but just to transform, even for someone like me.
That plus it seems there are more outside battery makers for it, so there should be more of a chance at seeing a 9cell or even better for it
CHAoS_NiNJA
[H]ard|Gawd
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A better question, when can we expect some netbooks featuring the Nano?
I agree, the Intel Atom board is $69.99 at the local Fry's. Meanwhile, any Via based mini-ITX boards are more expensive. I ended up buying a D201GLY2 board for $39.99 that comes with a low power Celeron 1200, it is EMT64 capable, etc. SiS chipset but it seems to perform fine in Linux and FreeNAS (what I am using it for).
According to testing at some other sites the D201GLY boards use 25-30 watts. I think the difference between 25 and 40 watts is probably no more than a couple of bucks a month on my electric bill, at least at 12 cents a kilowatt hour. In otherwords, acquisition cost is king in this segment and it's where Intel will win with their manufacturing prowess. Nobody's going to use one of these low power solutions for hard core gaming. That is not at all the point in this segment.
Anyways, I couldn't justify the Via solutions based on economics so long as they cost as much as they do. My current solution can saturate my 100 Mbps network running FreeNAS so there's no need for any more computing power than it has.
defaultluser
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Nice article.
I'd love to cheer for Atom, but the fact is Intel is slitting their own throat by pairing it with the 845GC. Sure, it's dirt cheap, but the 130nm process means high power consumption.
If Intel were serious about properly creating a low-power MiniITX Atom board, they could pair it with the GM945 (mobile version, more expensive), which has a TDP of 10w less than the 945GC. but they'd rather just dump these boards for next-to-nothing.
The Via Nano looks enticing, but Kyle, I would suggest you run comparison benchmarks of this Celeron MiniITX board:
http://resources.mini-box.com/online/MBD-I-D201GLY/intel-d201gly-power-consumption.html
I think the Celeron will come out as a close match, since it already has pretty low power consumption, and more instructions per-clock than Via can manage.
I'd love to cheer for Atom, but the fact is Intel is slitting their own throat by pairing it with the 845GC. Sure, it's dirt cheap, but the 130nm process means high power consumption.
If Intel were serious about properly creating a low-power MiniITX Atom board, they could pair it with the GM945 (mobile version, more expensive), which has a TDP of 10w less than the 945GC. but they'd rather just dump these boards for next-to-nothing.
The Via Nano looks enticing, but Kyle, I would suggest you run comparison benchmarks of this Celeron MiniITX board:
http://resources.mini-box.com/online/MBD-I-D201GLY/intel-d201gly-power-consumption.html
I think the Celeron will come out as a close match, since it already has pretty low power consumption, and more instructions per-clock than Via can manage.
Since Atom is going to be aimed at the MID and UMPC market (according to the article at least), perhaps a future article could compare the Atom series against something like Texas Instruments' OMAP ARM processors, which frequently get put into smartphones, PDAs, and other very pocketable internet access devices. I suppose there are many inherent problems with doing a comparison like that since the two processors are on two completely different platforms but I think that since they're used (supposedly) for the same purpose, it would be nice to compare real world usage and power draw. 5W may not seem a lot but if that's draining from a cellphone battery, it might become a lot more important to save each extra watt.
Great article though, I haven't seen any benchmarks for Nano before this so it was enlightening.
Great article though, I haven't seen any benchmarks for Nano before this so it was enlightening.
There's already one out there hirschma, the Kohjinsha SC3. Performance is good. Battery life was the dumps. Import from Japan if you want one now.
Overclocking an Atom, that is like taking a Geo Metro to the dragstrip with NOS on it.
it might go fast for a bit, but it will still be slow.
Atom's biggest feature is it's lazyness, all the cpu does is sleep. it prefers to be in low power sleep mode.
Buying & building my Atom system was a lot of fun. Cost was low and the services I run on it 24/7 are saving a few bucks in power compared to a normal desktop. Speed across the wire is good and doing admin chores via command line or RDP run fast enough. It will be a better product when they bundle it with a laptop chipset, but for now it's working great for me and I have no complaints.
I decided to build an Atom-based machine just for fun and I must say I am completely satisfied with it. I am running XP SP3 with 2GB of RAM and I was really surprised with how responsive it is. I don't really do anything too intense with it, just web surfing, Office, play the occasional DVD, and some other light tasks. I know that Atom looks rather anemic in these tests, but you still have to remember it was designed to do simple things like I listed above. I wouldn't dare install Windows Vista on it. When I first purchased Vista, I installed it on a 3.40C P4 HT with 3GB of RAM and a 7800 GS and I wouldn't call that machine "fast" with it. I am not a Vista hater (I own three copies of it ), but I do know that a processor designed to be used in a device that will fit in your hand where low power draw is paramount should not be expected to run it well.
When you think about what most people normally do on a small notebook, the processor is idle far, far more than it is running at full load. So, if it came down to a processor that was considerably faster when I have it running full bore versus a processor that just sips power at idle and really doesn't use much more at full load, I am going to pick the more frugal CPU. I understand the logic behind a faster processor using more power (Nano) will still use the same amount of energy as a slower, lower powered one (Atom). However, it still goes back to what the Atom was intended for; it is not going to be chugging away at full tilt for very long at all with the applications most people would be running. I really don't think Nano is very impressive when it comes to power usage compared to Atom. I mean Atom is using a desktop chipset and it is still using around the same amount of juice as the Nano and its platform. If you had Poulsbo and Atom together, well I think the Nano would be trounced in power usage despite its quicker execution.
Not to be an ass, but if you care about how much faster the Nano is at encoding a music file or something along those lines then you are missing the point of this processor. Now, that is just my 2 cents worth.
), but I do know that a processor designed to be used in a device that will fit in your hand where low power draw is paramount should not be expected to run it well.When you think about what most people normally do on a small notebook, the processor is idle far, far more than it is running at full load. So, if it came down to a processor that was considerably faster when I have it running full bore versus a processor that just sips power at idle and really doesn't use much more at full load, I am going to pick the more frugal CPU. I understand the logic behind a faster processor using more power (Nano) will still use the same amount of energy as a slower, lower powered one (Atom). However, it still goes back to what the Atom was intended for; it is not going to be chugging away at full tilt for very long at all with the applications most people would be running. I really don't think Nano is very impressive when it comes to power usage compared to Atom. I mean Atom is using a desktop chipset and it is still using around the same amount of juice as the Nano and its platform. If you had Poulsbo and Atom together, well I think the Nano would be trounced in power usage despite its quicker execution.
Not to be an ass, but if you care about how much faster the Nano is at encoding a music file or something along those lines then you are missing the point of this processor. Now, that is just my 2 cents worth.
Outamyhead
Supreme [H]ardness
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Holy crap, I just hope the manufacturers that are going to use the Nano have great way of showing how much better it is than Intel's offering (maybe they can borrow [H]'s benchmarks?), because Intel are the kings of propaganda and sale strategy (or strong arming as they are currently calling it in Europe).
), because Intel are the kings of propaganda and sale strategy (or strong arming as they are currently calling it in Europe).jasonistaken
n00b
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You do realize that VIA pioneered the Mini-ITX format 7 years ago <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX>, not 1.5, as stated.
I'd really like to see how Nano compares in performance / watt to the ULV Merom and the P8400 Penryns. Throw in an underclocked BE-2400 and it'd be a very interesting comparison.
Its rediculous that the chipset takes so much more power than the cpu. It would be excellent if there were some way to compare chipset power use directly.
Its rediculous that the chipset takes so much more power than the cpu. It would be excellent if there were some way to compare chipset power use directly.
DarkLegacy
[H]ard|Gawd
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It's Via vs Intel in the long run. Intel is the more recognized brand so in the long run, it will be the superior choice by consumers regardless of its performance. The advantages for Via may look good in these benchmarks & paper but it wont help them much.
AltTabbins
Fully [H]
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No hardocp Golden [H] for the nano?