VIA Nano Bests Intel Atom In Netbook Benchmarks 130
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."
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?
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.
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 time where I find I'm wishing for more compute power is when I'm watching HD flash video. (like Hulu or Youtube in HD mode - I get dropped frames)
I believe this is because Flash is written really quite poorly, and the video rendering code isn't very good. If I download the video and play it with VLC or something, it plays smoothly.
This is really the only reason I want more compute power on my eee pc. I'm actually hoping silverlight takes off so I don't have this problem anymore.
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
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?
Re:All but the important test (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.