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VIA Nano Bests Intel Atom In Netbook Benchmarks
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 10, 2009 04:08 PM
from the still-too-slow dept.
from the still-too-slow dept.
Glib Piglet writes "ZDNet UK has a whole set of benchmarks comparing a 1.8 GHz Nano in VIA's Epia SN motherboard and a 1.6 GHz Atom in Intel's 'Little Falls' D945GCFL mobo. It's not good news for Chipzilla: 'As far as memory performance is concerned, the Nano is clearly superior in every test' and 'The VIA Nano emerges as the better processor for internet tasks. While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.' The Nano even outperforms Nehalem on one test. It's not all a win for VIA, though. The benchmark concludes that in some ways all netbooks, underpowered as they are, remain in the IT stone ages."
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I'd be nice to see it in some devices... (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor tests (Score:5, Interesting)
The VIA chip has built-in crypto accelerators and the idiots running the test pick something that doesn't use it! How about a with and without for comparison?
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No doubt for all those wi-fi access points you'll be cracking on your Acer Netbook, right?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Or maybe for free (as in performance) whole-system disk encryption?
Unfortunately, 'reviewers' think it beneath them to actually do any work beyond running their standardized tests. I've tried to reason with some of them before. They'll just continue running their LAME-MT and non-padlock enabled truecrypt or whatever. I tell you though, with Intel finally having crypto primitives in their new instruction set, they'll have to adapt sooner or later. Just as soon as Intel provide the how-to and/or software for
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Processor with markedly higher power draw achieves superior benchmark results. News at 11.
And that while benchmarks are skewed against it (Score:5, Interesting)
PCMark 2005 has been shown to yield wildly varying results for the nano depending on which CPU ID (CentaurHauls, GenuineAMD, AuthenticIntel) it is being presented with: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/07/atom-nano-review.ars/6 [arstechnica.com]. Not surprisingly, if PCMark is made to think it is an Intel CPU, the benchmarks suddenly jump up across the board. Intel money buys good benchmarks.
Now find one... (Score:3, Insightful)
The real news here is that even with these numbers, VIA will manage to blow whatever opportunity they have to gain advantage on netbooks.
It'll either be overpriced, hard to obtain in quantity or both. VIA seems to have a bad habit of showing stuff that, while it isn't vaporware, it's not something you'll actually SEE short of a consumer electronics show somewhere.
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Intel Atom 330 turns the tables though (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=664 [pcper.com]
The benchmarks for the new Atom 330, dual-core HyperThreaded CPU seem to turn the tides though.
The Nano has ALWAYS been a better CPU than the Atom but that doesn't seem to matter when it comes to the push that Intel has...
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The benchmarks for the new Atom 330, dual-core HyperThreaded CPU seem to turn the tides though.
Atom 330 benchmarks have been out for months, and Intel is limiting it to desktops.
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That's more because of TDP, I suspect.
132 seconds to display simple HTML page? (Score:2)
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds."
I was thinking of getting a netbook, but damn, not with that performance. Over 2 minutes? Is this a big miscalculation somehow?
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I don't know what the hell kind of webpage they were trying to display... I have an Acer Netbook with the Atom in it, running Windows 7. It renders slashdot, ars, and even facebook, within 3 seconds or so...
Re:132 seconds to display simple HTML page? (Score:5, Informative)
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds."
Whoosh?
Parent
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With the word 'pages' in there, I'm inclined to think they have a set of a pages they throw at it, probably picked to test a bunch of different types of elements to render or control for some other variable. The time is likely the aggregate time it takes to render all of the pages in total.
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The point is that there are error bars on the measurements. Maybe the atom renders a single page in 500ms and the via in 300ms. That's all well and good, but what if the processor was handling some other background task for one or the other during that time? The extra few ms makes a difference. So, instead they have each one render some 100+ pages in a row. Little anomalies like that get averaged out, so you get a better comparison between the two.
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I wondered that, too. even 70 seconds is way too long. And they are referring to "simple" HTML pages. Maybe they meant milliseconds.
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I'll also join in and say those numbers are just wrong. My Acer AspireOne renders all kinds of webpages with no noticeable difference from my desktop machine
Atom has almost enough compute for me (Score:2, Interesting)
*Disclaimer: I work for Intel
*Disclaimer 2: I actually do software research for Intel, and I haven't a clue about anything to do with hardware or business
I have a little EEE pc with an Atom 1.6GHz - I'm actually find it does have enough compute for most of what I do.
I did a stopwatch test on my computer - it takes less than 45 seconds from pushing the power button to getting on the network and rendering a web page. I'm running WinXP, but people have reported significantly better numbers with Linux.
The only
No Intel Idle Power usage?? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_pwr.jpg [zdnet.co.uk]
Why doesn't Intel get scored on IDLE power consumption? Who cares about MAXIMUM when idle is the state that most of these netbooks will be in. wtf?
left in the stone age? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The benchmark concludes that in some ways all netbooks, underpowered as they are, remain in the IT stone ages."
i don't know what kind of netbooks they're talking about, all newer netbooks (with decent resolution like 1024x600+ and 1gb of ram with a intel atom or via nano) perform VERY well, you can play quake3 in those using the onboard intel chip at the netbook lcd's native resolution, you can install windows xp and use that normally or go the [better] linux way and have a fully capable machine for programming, fun , studies.....
i used to listen to mp3s while programming on my first linux box , and that was a pentium 166mhz with 64mb of ram.....kernel 2.2.dontknow, can you guys tell me where 1.6ghz of processor with usb/wifi/bluetooth/1gb of ram/3d accelerated graphics is stone age? i wonder why they allow this kind of bullshit to reach slashdot's front page T__T
Re:First Post (Score:4, Insightful)
While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.
With those speeds, why do they call these things "netbooks?" :)
Parent
Re:First Post (Score:5, Informative)
I don't believe you.
While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages, the Nano does it in 70.1 seconds.
With those speeds, why do they call these things "netbooks?" :)
Very large web page. 17 seconds on an e5200 (That's a 2.5Ghz Core2Duo).
I had a feeling the second I learned the Atom was an In-Order processor that it was going to suck. Sure enough, it feels rather sluggish. Getting a dual core + dual threaded Atom might be better.
VIA's documentation is a nightmare to trudge through. Their hardware is usually great, but designing a product around it tends to be very difficult. With Intel, OTOH, we usually have no trouble getting a hold of an engineer if we have questions. Poor VIA...we'd love to use their chip but their support just isn't dependable when we have deadlines to meet.
I hope the netbook crowd (Acer esp) can muscle some legit documentation from them-- I'd take the Nano over the Atom any day.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because you'll get a chance to catch up on reading a book while your browsing the net.
Re:All but the important test (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:All but the important test (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Thank you for pointing that out, I couldn't tell from the GGP's moderation. ;)
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Yes, it is. [amazon.com]
Re:All but the important test (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:All but the important test (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, when the cpus are at load, the Atom processor is consuming ~8.5 watts of power, and the VIA is consuming ~25 or 26 watts of power. This looks to me that the via processor is consuming 4 times the power of the Atom, not merely 50% more.
Of course, this estimate is assuming that the Atom processor's idle power is only 5 watts. In reality, the idle power it consumes is likely even lower, as it was designed to minimize power dissipation. Now, claiming that the VIA's system power is approximately 50% more than the Atom is not accurate, but that doesn't mean that the CPU is not consuming that much more power. Anyone doing a fair comparison between the processors would likely be focusing on the difference in power of the CPUs themselves. Otherwise in a full system, the difference between a CPU that requires 50 Watts of power, and one that requires 100Watts of power wouldn't be that significant.
Phil
Parent
Bullshit! (Score:3, Informative)
And still, your whole dissertation -- which apparently comes straight out of your uninformed ass -- is completely useless,
since the Atom can only be so low in power usage, because all the power-draining stuff is in the north-bridge!
Have you ever looked at a board with an Atom CPU? The thing with the big fat cooler is the north-bridge. That what looks like the north-bridge is the actual Atom CPU!
And if you take the sum of the power those two chips need, they lose to every "netbook CPU"! By far...
But as long
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole power usage thing as classically measured by what the processor draws under load doesn't exactly produce a fair and accurate picture. For instance, since AMD chips of recent years have tended to consume more power than Intel offerings. However, the north bridge for AMD chips consumes less power than for Intel in large part because the memory controller is bolted onto the AMD chip rather than the north bridge. Also, if a processor consumes say 50 watts of power and completes a given task in 15 s
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
...50% more? since when? Sure, the Nano may use more power, but it's nowhere near 50% more. 60.1*1.5 is 90.15, and x2 it's 120.2. The Nano tops out at 77.5. Making up bullshit is not "interesting" or "insightful".
You should investigate further before you claim bullshit.
In fact, the OP was quite generous to Nano. The 1.8 GHz Nano is rated (by Via) at 25W TDP (Thermal Design Power). The 1.6 GHz Atom 230 (desktop version) is rated (by Intel) at 4W TDP, the N270 (1.6 GHz netbook version) at 2.5W, and the latest N280 (1.666 GHz netbook) is a mere 2.0W. I'm sure Intel and Via use slightly different methods for measuring TDP, but not that different, you know?
Nano doesn't seem to have separate desktop and netbook versio
Re:All but the important test (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. This review misses the point entirely. Netbooks are about portability--size and battery life. An Intel Atom-powered netbook can do all your web/officy stuff (as well as full-screen Hulu) and run for eight hours on a charge. There is no benefit in bumping the speed up a touch if that means shortening battery life.
If you want video editing and gaming capabilities, netbooks aren't for you. The only netbook processors that might interest me would be those that give me more speed with the same or less power use as the Atom.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't use my Atom-powered netbook for physics simulations, so I spend zero time waiting for it to "do stuff." The network speed is pretty much always the bottleneck.
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The Intel Atom at 1.6Ghz [wikipedia.org] is a 2-4 watt processor.
While they hide it in the details of their press release [via.com.tw] a bit, the VIA Nano processor [wikipedia.org] running at 1Ghz is the 8 Watt processor I believe you're referring to while the 1.8Ghz processor tips the scales at around 25 Watts.
Re:All but the important test (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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I'm sorry I misinterpreted your response to a processor-related article to not be about the processors being analyzed.
As a side note, I'd like to add that it's funny that as I said the Nano benchmarked is a 25 watt processor and the Atom benchmarked is a
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Well it would be interesting to see the 1GHz Nano vs the 1.6GHz Atom since they would appear to have about the same power envelope once chipset is considered (assuming all other parts between the two units were equivalent) but that's not what the article was comparing at all so claiming the the Nano bests the Atom was way off base.
And on that I completely agree.
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Yeah, it's 1.5-2x faster but it also draws 50% more power
That means if it is under clocked to draw the same power it's still likely 50% faster. That's still a win for VIA. Heck, even if you under clock it and its only 20% faster, faster is still faster. I'm not sure how you see that as a lose.
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The power consumption numbers in TFA are totally useless as applied to netbooks. My laptop (an ultraportable, not a netbook... it has a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo in it) uses maybe 25 watts at full load, and maybe 8-9 watts at idle, counting the screen and wireless (that's in Windows; Linux uses slightly more power for some reason).
TFA quotes one system at 48 watts and the other at 68 watts under load. You can't say that this is representative of their performance in a netbook.
The real question is, if you compare
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Re:Is that really a win? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Not A HTML page, HTML pages . i-bench is a browser torture test discontinued in 2003 and the HTML dates back to 2001 so it's not too relevant to today's web where CSS and DOM dominate, not table based layouts.
You, sir, need to be modded informative before another dozen "my netbook renders web pages in 2 seconds - they must be using Vista lolz" posts go up.
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I love VIA processors because I've had great experiences with them, but this particular "win" seems to have very little actual value to it.