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."
Hmm. (Score:1, Informative)
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Re:All but the important test (Score:4, Informative)
Re:All but the important test (Score:5, Funny)
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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)
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
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thank god, someone gets it!!!!
the only thing that is stopping via from being HUGE is their gpu. if they had a faster, more reliable solution we'd all be using via netbooks right now.
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
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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
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...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.
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That's not quite true. Most of the use of a netbook doesn't need a powerful CPU, it's true. Currently my Atom-powered netbook has clocked itself down to 1 Ghz; for posting on slashdot, nothing more is necessary. However, that's not to say that there is never a need for it to scale back up. It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
I would want a faster processor if only to reduce bootup time.
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It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
If you buy a Toyota Echo, you have an affordable little car that will reliably get you from Point A to Point B. But you have to accept that your cargo capacity is going to be rather limited, and even if it's possible to get it above 85mph on the highway, the car wasn't really designed to do that.
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It's actually pretty easy to go 136 km/h (85 mph) in a Toyota Echo. I'd say anything up to 160 km/h is trivial. Over that and buffeting winds or curved roads will probably make you uncomfortable. But still, it'll go all the way to the 180 km/h limit where the governor kicks in. And that's probably just because the stock tires are only rated to 180 km/h (like stock tires for almost every car).
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Also, eight hours on a charge? Where can I get me some of that?
you can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NC10-14GBK-10-2-Inch-Netbook-Processor/dp/B001O94FY8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1234307109&sr=8-2 [amazon.com]
its rates it at 6, but other places rate it at 8. to be completely fair - i do own this bit of kit and i regularly get a reading of 6hours batter left. and i run xp - linux would probably realize that 8 hours
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The Samsung NC10, as well as several Asus modles do 8 hours. MSI has a version of the Wind with an 8 hour battery, too.
Personally, I bought the NC10. It seems to be slightly superior to its peers in every category (except price--markets at work, I guess).
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Old benchies from last august put them at equal battery life, which suggests to me that it's the size of the battery affecting the battery life of the netbook - not the Atom or Nano CPU.
It's long been known that Nanos are incredibly fast compared to Atoms.
Now if only I could buy one. "Released" a year ago, huh? Where? :P
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I haven't done this maths so this might all be wrong.
But if you spend more time waiting for the Atom to do stuff do you get more usable time out of the Atom or Nano, rather than waiting for it to computer something. So your 8 hours might be something like 6 with 2 hours waiting for the computer to catch up.
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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.
And Vista (Score:2)
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It also depends whether it would be worth using more power but finishing the task quicker, assuming that when idling they would be more or less comparable. One problem the Atom has had so far is that the chipsets they have been paired with draw a lot of power by themselves making the power savings less noticeable than they could have been.
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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)
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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.
power usage vs cpu performance (Score:2)
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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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I'd be nice to see it in some devices... (Score:3, Insightful)
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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?
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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
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The Nano has been available for a while now, but the (64-bit) Linux kernel still doesn't support the crypto accelerator and random number generator.
I recently bought a Nano based Jetway board and had add crypto and rng support myself. It's mostly working now, but I'm waiting for VIA documentation to do things the right way.
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.
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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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Are crappy support and drivers also part of those joys?
I've written off VIA a long time ago.
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.
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And the dual-core Nano will turn the tides on it - except that, you can't buy dual-core Nanos.
Intel won with the Atom because they actually sold Atoms. I can't find Nanos anywhere! I've been looking for a whole year.
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Really? I always thought the Atom used less power, making it a better processor for use in netbooks (where the Atom is aimed at).
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Yeah, well Via's driver support for Linux is horrible, while the Intel Atom stuff just works perfectly with Ubuntu out of the box. That may have something to do with why Intel is preferred.
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Yeah, well Via's driver support for Linux is horrible, while the Intel Atom stuff just works perfectly with Ubuntu out of the box. That may have something to do with why Intel is preferred.
While that would potentially make me (and possibly a number of others here) prefer the Atom, since in Real Life almost nobody runs Linux on their desktop it doesn't have much impact on anything.
My laptop does run Linux but it's a regular Core2. It's 11" though so I can actually carry it around.
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...
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Ditto here (Acer Aspire One with XP, using a 1.6GHz Atom N270). About 3 seconds for slashdot.
If firefox is already cached, it starts up in only 3 seconds.
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?
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Better context of this statement from the article would help. Because obviously single page renders are darn snappy (atleast on my Dell Mini 9 + Ubuntu 8.10). Do we have exact details on what pages they were trying to render in sequence to back your claim?
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Obviously, my Netflix queue.
Clearly... (Score:1, Funny)
They were using Windows Vista.
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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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If that's the case, then what's the point?
Doesn't matter if the atom did it in 130 seconds, because 70 seconds still sucks.
Whose going to be doing that in real life? That's like comparing which is faster at encoding h264. Doesn't matter what the results are, becuase it'll suck for both, and nobody will be doing this on a netbook in the first place.
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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 do it in real life, on my netbook. I save Firefox sessions and open about thirty pages at once whenever I load the application. The main point of a netbook is as an internet appliance, yes? Why are you surprised to find that one of the benchmarks involves opening web pages?
For encoding video, you are probably correct: anyone who is doing that is unlikely to be using a netbook. However, your post reads like an argument against benchmarking these computers at all. Perhaps you should reconsider your statemen
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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
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I'd also like to know what the hell they were testing it with.
I'm running Gentoo on my MSI Wind U90. It boots pretty damn quick (about as quick as my desktop, actually) runs smooth for all tasks.
WTF Test? (Score:1)
There's data missing for the Atom in the wattage test to the 132 second HTML rendering, I'm not sure this test is anywhere near correct...for anything.
What kind of MONSTER HTML file are they throwing at these systems? Why put the Cinebench multi CPU benchmark up if it doesn't show any data at all except for the Pentium E5200 (the Atom is a single core CPU, why even run it?). And how is a Cinebench 64 bit test running on Vista 32 bit?
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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.
Wait, what? (Score:1)
Okay, I didn't RTFA... 70 seconds to display a html page? As in one minute and ten point one seconds?
Err... Please tell me that I'm missing something here.
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Err... Please tell me that I'm missing something here.
How about the s? On the end of "pages"?
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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
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Just for fun: Power button to login, typing the URL to stackoverflow.com and letting it load = 1m10
This is on a stock eee701, with Debian+Xfce+Firefox. There's two big slowdowns - it takes several seconds to react to pressing the power button unless the AC is connected, and having an SD card in adds about 5 seconds. The SSD access LED isn't on constantly so I think there's room for improvement.
My real dislike with it is that resuming from standby takes almost as long as a cold boot.
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
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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
That's true. I did pretty much the same thing on a 128 MB Celeron 366. I programmed on it, surfed, listened to my mp3s. (It got a bit sluggish then but got the job done.) I played Q3 on it at 1024x768 - well I had a Riva TNT2 card. Sure, you won't be playing Crysis on a typical netbook anytime soon (except maybe on an Asus N10, albeit slowly) but calling it stone age tech is a bit of a stretch.
Is it just me, or is this a really dumb article? (Score:2)
So they compare the power consumption of _Netbook_ CPUs by comparing the power consumption of _Desktop_ motherboards running _Vista_, when every netbook I'm aware of runs XP or Linux and Intel is world-renowned for having tied the desktop Atom to an appallingly crappy, backward and power-hungry chipset?
Then we should be surprised that they discover that a CPU which takes far more power than the Atom gives better performance in tests which are probably single-threaded and hence not even using the Atom's CPU
What browser are they using!! (Score:2, Funny)
"While the Atom needs 132.8 seconds to display simple HTML pages"
Good to see IE8 coming out of beta
Netbooks might not be all that important. (Score:1)
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."
Even if netbooks (whatever that comes to mean, netbooks keep evolving into more powerful machines, people start saying, "Ya email and surfing is great but what about some modern games and Matlab?", but I digress) don't turn out to be huge (I disagree, who doesn't want a machine with insane battery life?) the whole overpowered phones with intertubes will be huge. So if VIA plays their cards right, (and ARM for that matter) they could have a really huge untapped market on their hands.
Nano's Crypto Smokes (Score:2)
It's interesting they didn't run any real crypto tests [zdnet.co.uk] that actually, you know, *used* the Nano properly. The Nano comes with the Padlock engine built in [hermann-uwe.de], for hardware crypto. With Padlock-aware software running crypto, the Nano "spanks" Core 2 Quads [meinss.de] with lots of welly and gives even Intel's i7 a run for its money.
Never believe articles with marketspeak (Score:2)
given my own experience... (Score:1)
What surprises me is that its only twice as fast.
A Looong time ago, when htpc's were becoming something interesting in AU (not long before digital tv was broadcast on all stations in AU - around 2002). I bought an epia nehemiah m10k (there weren't many to choose from at the time, the m8k was the other one and the big diff between the two was one was passive cooled and the other active - i got the active one for the extra cpu grunt).
Anyways, a short time ago I noticed that intel were shipping mini-itx boards
Typo, question, reaction (Score:2)
First the typo - the board is D945GCLF
Second, why didn' they use the dual-core, hyper-threading Atom MB, the D945GCLF2? The latest board, the D945GCLF2 includes Gigabit Ethernet, not Fast Ethernet. Link [newegg.com]
Finally, I've built systems with each of the "Little Falls" MBs from Intel, and all nice (considering cost) and very-capable MB/CPU combos. If the VIA CPUs are "better" that's great, but they tend to be very pricey by comparison ($85 for Intel vs. $285 for the VIA EPIA SN 1.8 GHz board referenced)
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?" :)
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.
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Agreed, same here. But I'm still waiting for the Ion platform to come out, which should best both of them, giving a good performance mark between the Atom/Nano and the Core 2 Duo.
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Because you'll get a chance to catch up on reading a book while your browsing the net.
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Re:Is that really a win? (Score:5, Informative)
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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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does it run crysis?
2.6 FPS :)
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don't you mean FPM?
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Yea, but you didn't set the details right, I got it going close to 60 SPF.
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