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Misleading title? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that amount of difference in power required, it's pretty obvious the nano would beat the atom, but that's like saying a smart car with a V8 is going to beat one with a V4 when it comes to speed (except they should have been testing efficiency, where the V4 blows the other out of the water)
Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Informative)
Well yes and no. Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state. When that is factored in the contest is a bit closer. Of course if the Nano does run for long it is going to bake your lap more than the Atom and drain the battery a lot faster.
Looking at the photos makes it plain where the problem now lies, the northbridge. If Intel can get theirs under control they will totally dominate the low power business. But since the Nano draws so much more power a low power northbridge won't help them as much, which bodes ill for the future. Intel has a lot more room for improvement while Via would have to pull a major rabbit out of their hat to cut much off their current power consumption numbers.
And for small computers that aren't running on batteries but do need to be fairly cool (i.e. quiet) the Nano will be the hands down winner just because Intel is playing marketing games.
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state.
Their numbers are messed up, though.
The VIA system uses 17.4 more watts while under load than the Intel system. That means if they are under load for one second, the VIA system has used 17.4 more watt-seconds than the Intel. On the other hand, the Intel only uses 0.9 more watts under load than the VIA uses when idle. So, if the VIA works for one second, then drops back to idle while the Intel is still working to complete the task, it would take 18.33 more seconds before their total power usage becomes the same (17.4 + (-0.9 * 18.33) == 0).
This means that to use the same amount of power over the long term, the VIA has to be able to complete tasks in ~5% of the time that the Intel takes. Put another way, the Intel would take 19 times as long to finish any task.
But, their own graphs show that the Intel system only takes about 2 times as long (at most) to finish tasks. So, there's no way that the VIA uses less energy over the long haul, but that's what they claim.
Their problem is that they are comparing the total power used by the VIA system only while "active" on the task, and not looking at the power that the VIA uses on idle while the Intel is still completing the task. This is like saying that as soon as you finish that task, you immediately power off (or drop to standby).
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Via Nano is currently built on a 65nm process and the Intel Atom on 45nm so Via has some room if they move to the 45nm process.
Makes me wonder if building the Atom on 45nm is costing them production of high price multi-core chips in order to squeeze themselves into this UMP market before the sector solidifies more. And seeing things like the TI OMAP 35xx chips it makes me wonder when the UMP market moves off x86. There is already pressure to bump up the price of the UMP as to not take away from the lowend laptop market.
LoB
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Insightful)
I4. There are very few V4 engines, probably because it wouldn't be any more balanced than an inline 4 configuration, but would require much greater complexity. You could make a V4 shorter than an I4, which is why it's used extensively in motorcycle, but it'll cost much more to design and build.
You're bang on though. An Intel Extreme quad-core will eat a Via Nano for breakfast. You could probably emulate the Via Nano faster on the Intel Extreme quad-core than the Via will even go. The thing is, the Nano will last for an hour on the energy the Intel Extreme quad-core will use in a minute.
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Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to actually read the article and then post, but the article makes it clear that the VIA Nano uses less power to perform the benchmark tests than the Intel chip, by taking slightly more power and finishing much faster. Running with 10% less wattage and taking 30% longer to complete is no savings.
[QUOTE]
For our MP3 encoding test, the VIA Nano processor used a total of 37,323 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy while the Intel Atom processor used 38,290 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy.
[/QUOTE]
Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Funny)
I hate to actually read the article and then post, but
Get Out
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Almost had me going there... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Almost had me going there... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the difference in power consumption between idle and load of the ENTIRE SYSTEM, as is clearly stated at the top of the chart.
The TDP on the most power hungry atom is only 4 watts.
Intel needs to pair the atom with an efficient chipset. Unfortunately any of the chipsets Intel currently has available to pair with the atom look like power hogs next to the atom.
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Uhmmm... measurements? (Score:3, Informative)
It seems they may be measuring the whole system load in comparing the efficiency of the processors, which is more than a little unfair. What sticks out more, though are numbers like "63,434 watts". Uhmm... no? Besides being a clearly invalid measurement, it should probably be expressed at watt-hours. No way either machine drew 63 kilowatt hours either.
TFA is broken.
Re:Uhmmm... measurements? (Score:5, Insightful)
>It seems they may be measuring the whole system load in comparing the efficiency of the processors
I think that's more fair as it's what's relevant to me as a customer of the end product; the computer.
Problem with the Atom side is that the chipsets used are crappy and use more than twice the energy of the CPU itself. So while the CPU might look great on paper, the actual products that use it does not have the fantastic battery times that you'd like (10h+)
These CPUs should be compared together with a viable chipset and memory subsystem combination. Add that up and there's the number you're interested in.
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Wait for the next generation (Score:5, Interesting)
The first generation of any product line is usually fairly rushed and experimental. That does not mean the product itself is bad, but we should expect a big jump from the next generation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The current generation of any product line is usually fairly rushed and experimental. That does not mean the product itself is bad, but we should expect a big jump from the next generation.
fixed it for ya
Re:Wait for the next generation (Score:4, Insightful)
Although the Nano represents a new chip series for Via, they have dominated the "ultra low power x86 PC-class" market for almost a decade now. I wouldn't, therefore, call it a fair comparison to call them both a first gen-chip. The Atom, yes. The Nano... To put it in terms more familiar to an Intel-dominated market, the Nano as a "first gen" more closely resembles the P3 vs the P2... Same basic core with a few modest improvements and running at a higher clock.
The FP post provides a simple example of my point:
that's 4 watts more than at idle, for about 60 watts total.
A truly low-power (yet entirely usable) system depends on more than just an efficient CPU. If your chipset and GPU and RAM each suck down more than the CP under load, you may as well splurge a bit on the Watts and go for a beefier CPU, because you'll never really see the difference in terms of battery life (or the AC equivalent, UPS runtime).
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conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:conspiracy (Score:4, Funny)
yeah, a 2.6Ghz Intel Quad Core would do great driving my smart phone... those 5 minute battery times and second degree burns to the hand just make talking to people or connecting to my ssh server from my phone a pure delight!
Erm... different job, different tools???
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Re:conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
But lately I see them getting more and more into the CPU business. They start pushing out their own motherboards, with their own processors, graphics chips, everything. Not only that, but their processors are beating Intels and their integrated graphics are on par with Intels!
I think it won't be long until we see some real desktop processors for other motherboards coming out- I mean VIA CPUs for ASUS, Foxconn, Supermicro, MSI, etc., competing at the same level with AMD and Intel... I think it's about time, too. We have this underdog who we buy because they're our favorites and not because they're better, still on 65nm processors while Intel has released 45nm and is getting ready to push out 35nm and 25nm- It's time we get some real choice. Maybe we can have a favorite company who also makes the better products. Choice is good.
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Via's been churning out processor's for years now - it's just that they don't target the average american desktop user. They make slower, cheaper, low power chips that were traditionally intended for very low cost computers sold in Asia (where in some of the poorer economies performance isn't so important as getting the cost down as low as possible), and now in mobile devices where the power consumption is a big issue.
I don't think you'll see Via competing with Intel and AMD in the mainstream desktop business anytime soon - that's a real but increasingly less important venue. People are replacing their computers less often these days (desktop processors have been "fast enough" for a good while now), and there is a big focus on mobile devices these days.
It certainly would be nice to bring back choice in desktop processors though. I remember way back when the Pentiums were on the scene, a customer generally had a choice between Intel, AMD, IDT, Rise, or Cyrix (sometimes marked IBM) processors. Further back in the 486 days you didn't have Rise or IDT but TI made x86 processors back then. The upside too was that back then, everything used the same motherboards/sockets, so going from one chip maker to another was trivial.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not long ago I only knew VIA as a chipset maker and a maker of chips for some other devices/things that weren't really "brand name" items.
Methinks you are a young man, sir. VIA used to be much more relevant than they have been in the last few years. However, it is very pleasing to see them picking up again and standing against the competition.
VIA has become a real threat to Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a clear future in little laptop machines that don't cost much and don't use much power, yet are powerful enough to do most of the things most users do with laptops. The low end x86 CPUs are finally good enough to power such machines.
The laptop manufacturers had a Detroit mentality of "more computer per computer". This kept laptop prices up and margins high. But, as it turns out, cramming enough CPU power into a laptop to run wind tunnel simulations isn't what users really need. Especially when the network connection is the bottleneck anyway. The actual uses for a 4-CPU laptop [youtube.com] are somewhat limited.
The flood of low-cost laptops has just started. The EE PC set off a race for the bottom. In a year or two, laptops will come in blister packs at the drugstore, in the section with the calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other office supplies. From here on, it's all about lowering margins. Intel and Microsoft will be squeezed hard on price.
Target's Linux laptops (Score:3, Informative)
Target is getting serious about Linux laptops. Looking under "Laptops", the first screen of "Featured items" has 3 colors of the EE PC, Linux version, and some HP laptop. The XP version of the EE PC costs $100 more.
It's a tie (Score:3, Insightful)
What really bothers me is that the Atom setup seems to use as much power idle as under load. What's going on there? Did the benchmarkers forget to switch on power management or what?
Re:It's a tie (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say it's rather far from a tie when you consider more than simply power consuption.
As the story points out Intel is restraining board designers from using desirable technology on the Atom platform. No PCI Express, no DVI, no second memory slot. Theory is "Intel appears to fear Atom will cannibalize its Celeron sales". Perhaps. I'll bet VIA is more than willing to cannibalize those sales if Intel is going to let them.
The reference board in this review is nice. There are two ethernet phys, one of which must be gigabit [via.com.tw]. Compact Flash, mini-PCI and PCI Express. Damn. I like that board. That is the perfect board for the small, quiet home server.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Intel board could be a lot better if they used mobile chipsets. I have an old Shuttle desk
More benchmarks and analysis here - HotHardware (Score:5, Informative)
Another review at arstechnica.com... (Score:5, Informative)
...with the same findings.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars [arstechnica.com]
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Biggers news: PCMark 2005 skews memory tests (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading through that article, I found this [arstechnica.com]:
My my. Swap CentaurHauls for AuthenticAMD, and Nano's performance magically jumps about 10 percent. Swap for GenuineIntel, and memory performance goes up no less than 47.4 percent. This is not a test error or random occurance; I benchmarked each CPUID multiple times across multiple reboots on completely clean Windows XP installations. The gains themselves are not confined to a small group of tests within the memory subsystem evaluation, but stretch across the entire series of read/write tests. Only the memory latency results remain unchanged between the two CPUIDs.
Whoops! I wonder what they'll have to say about that...
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Performance for full day battery life (Score:3, Informative)
The Atom is a bit on the slow side. Like using ARM chips for desktop computing; so why not simply use an ARM chip?
Still, if the Atom's paired with a super low powered chipset we might just finally have computers with more than 8 hours of battery life (while still being affordable/portable/small). Imagine taking your computer to work, and then leaving it on all day. A small detail, but makes a big difference.
The Nano is faster, but it also use about 8 watts more power (according to HardOCP [hardocp.com]). Those 8 watts is a big deal when it comes to battery life, but OTOH Atom is quite a bit faster than even the fastest Atom. The difference being big enough that HardOCP stated that Vista on Nano was notably more resposive - notable enough to be picked up on in blind tests.
So perhaps Atom trades off too much performace...
The 4 watts comment (Score:4, Informative)
For those of you interested, the Atom CPU really DOES use just about 4 watts at load. The 60 watts number is for the entire system including power supply, motherboard, DVD-ROM, hard drive, etc. Idle power on both of these parts is measured in milli-watts so you can see how much power each uses under load by looking at the power consumption graphs on page 8:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=597&type=expert&pid=8 [pcper.com]
The gap between rest (on the far left) and load (middle) is much greater for the VIA Nano processor than the Intel Atom - in fact you can barely tell the Atom processor has changed wattage at all.
Re:The 4 watts comment (Score:5, Informative)
Eliminating the hard drive and optical drive, the Atom board still draws 40-50 watts. On my board, I observe a 55-65 watt draw from the wall with just the board, which taking PSU losses into account, is about right.
The part that it entirely irking is that that board alone draws more than my entire laptop, which includes a Core Duo, hard drive and a *display*, for crying out loud. Not such a great way to show off a low-power CPU.
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With only 4 more watts... (Score:3, Funny)
explaination of energy efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
The article writers don't seem to be very technical guys.
If we look at the energy efficiency, Atom hands Via it's bilblical arse.
Let's talk about Joules, the things a battery stores. Batteries are important. Especially for the target marget of these two CPUs. In fact, battery life is most likely THE most important factor in anything below a notebook.
Keep in mind a battery only has so many joules between charges, that's obvious, I know.
Now, an efficient architecture would only use as many joules as needed to get the job done in a timely manner. Joules per seconds are Watts, btw.
So lets look at how these two stack up in terms of Joule consumption and Performance based on this data...
The VIA requires about 17W of power to chug through MP3 encode, for about 460 seconds. That means the power supply had to deliver 17 * 460 = 7,820 joules.
Now the Atom crawled along 30% slower, about 600 seconds to complete. But it only needed a delivery rate of 4 J/s, so it ate 2,400 joules.
So for a 30% improvement in performance, VIA had to gobble down MORE THAN THREE TIMES the energy!
That means you could encode 3x as many MP3s on an atom, but it will take 30% longer. Imagine if this was an iPod. Who would trade 3x less battery life for such a tiny bump? That isn't something to brag about when you are targeting a market starving for battery life.
I'll be really surprised if Via goes anywhere other than a few cheap Asian design wins.
Re:explaination of energy efficiency (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:explaination of energy efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
The VIA requires about 17W of power to chug through MP3 encode, for about 460 seconds. That means the power supply had to deliver 17 * 460 = 7,820 joules.
Now the Atom crawled along 30% slower, about 600 seconds to complete. But it only needed a delivery rate of 4 J/s, so it ate 2,400 joules.
And now for the elephant in the room: Why are you encoding MP3s while you're running on batteries?
The normal workload for an ultra-portable running on batteries is not producing MP3s. Its outputting static screens to a beamer during a presentation, or surfing the "series of tubes" [washingtonpost.com] via the local WiFi spot between classes (or waiting for the plane). If you've got numbers or MP3s to crunch, save it for when you've got the thing plugged in, silly!
Assuming the average CPU loading is going to be a paltry 2-3% (essentially idle), you're looking at a very capable system using an average of somewhere around 61W vs. a less capable system using only 56W. The difference in battery time between those two is barely significant, which makes the increased potential performance of the Nano a big win in my book. When plugged in, the Nano is a passable desktop replacement. The Atom, not so much.
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That Which We Call a Rose...? (Score:5, Funny)
OK, let me see if I've got this straight. The VIA Isaiah beat out the Intel Silverthorne. Then the VIA Isaiah was renamed the Via Nano, and the Intel Silverthorne was renamed the Intel Atom. Now the VIA is still beating the Intel? So what you're telling me is that a name change has no effect on chip performance? Well, color me shocked!
The biggest problem with the Atom... (Score:3, Informative)
... is the chipset it's paired with. I recently bought an Intel motherboard with an Atom on it. Whilst the CPU is only 4-ish watts, the board draws around 40-50 watts. That's the board, not optical or hard drives.
That northbridge, with the non-power-optimized video card and memory controller, sucks up the juice. The heatsink on the northbridge is 4x larger than the one on the CPU. Furthermore, the heatsink on the northbridge has a fan, where the HS on the CPU has none.
In-order hyperthreading? (Score:4, Interesting)
I took my graduate level architecture class from Dean Tullsen at UCSD, who invented 'hyperthreading' although it was called Symmetrical MultiThreading (SMT) back then. As I recall the entire greatness of the architecture was recognizing that all the fancy hardware introduced to allow out-of-order speculative execution could actually be leveraged to allow the processor to drive multiple independent threads at the same time, without much additional overhead. So if intel's atom (haven't been following it) uses an in-order core and hyperthreading that just don't make much sense. Anyone care to provide an explanation?
'Only' 4 watts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I supposed to be impressed?
The new Cortex-A8 ARM processor [arm.com] consumes 300mW; less than a tenth that of the Atom. The Atom is marginly faster, but not much so --- the figures I've found show that a Cortex develops about 2.0 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz, vs about 2.4 for the Atom. Plus, the Cortex is a CPU core, not a discrete chip; most actual products couple it with an on-chip OMAP DSP engine, which is ideal for doing things like video encoding or decoding or OpenGL. With Atom you end up having to couple it with a dedicated GPU...
Platform choice (Score:5, Interesting)
I was liking both processors up until I found this gem in the article:
Here we see Intel, up to its obnoxious "You'll use our technology only as we prescribe" games. This is the same philosophy that leisurely milked the market for 33Mhz CPU bumps every 6 months, while they sat on years worth of better technology, until AMD lit a fire under their ass.
Don't be fooled again.
Power consumption is rather high for both of them (Score:4, Insightful)
The energy star 5 standard requires 50 watts or less at idle, something the old C7-D platforms from via managed quite easily, are they including the display in the system power consumption perhaps, or just using shoddy parts in other spots?
Also, what is the power consumption of the lower end Nano processors? As I recall, the slower nano managed to (barely) outbenchmark the atom, it would be a much better platform to check power consumption against in this case.
I also point out that for these kinds of systems, 3D based benchmarks seem fairly useless, neither platform is targeted at gaming or graphics development.
Re:The chart shows 60 watts (Score:5, Informative)
They get the 4 watts from observing that when idle the system is at 56 watts, but when at a full load it meanders over to the 60.1 watt range.
60-56 = 4
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The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that they don't know how much of that idle load is due to the CPU. You don't know whether that 4 watt difference is due to an efficient high power mode, or a really inefficient low power mode.
for instance, the nano might be 1 watt unloaded and 19 watts fully loaded, while the atom might be 20 watts unloaded and 24 watts loaded. This is clearly not the case, but would be consistent with the results.
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Re:x86-64? (Score:4, Informative)
x86-64 and EM64T are the same instruction set.
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Re:Wake me up when Tegra joins the race (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think x86 compatibility is a very useful feature for hand-held devices, or even for mini-laptops. Windows is fine on my desktop. I don't want it hogging the resources on my hand-held. When it comes to BSD/Linux, it's easy to recompile apps for a different platform. It's less easy to customize the apps for the smaller screens and lack of input devices, but it's not like that would be any easier for a Windows app.
Ultra low power combined with powerful graphics, on the other hand, is so much more useful. I may be a bit biased because I'm a 3D graphics/game developer, but great games and audio/video playback are incredibly desirable features on devices like this. And it's not like it won't be able to run a web browser, mail client, etc.
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