Is the Intel Atom going to beef up mobile performance?
There’s a lot of buzz about the June release of the Intel Atom processor. The Atom is Intel’s new mobile platform designed to be used in Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and eventually in Ultra-Portable PCs (UMPCs). I say eventually because according to the blurbs I’ve seen from Intel the second phase of the Atom, formerly code-named Silverthorne, is the one they claim will run in UMPCs that need more performance The lower end Atom based on the Diamondville chipset is not recommended for running Vista and Intel has hedged on what it will do running XP. A lot of excitement is being generated by word that Asus is planning an Atom-based model of the EEE PC later this year and I’m also hearing a lot of similar excitement over the thought that HP will move from the Via processor to the Atom this year too. While HP has never indicated they would make that switch if they find it in their best interest to do so I’m sure they will.
So what does the Atom buy us in these notebooks over current solutions? No question the power consumption is much lower with the Atom, that is one of its designed strengths so that’s important. Mobile devices need all the battery life they can get and Atom will sure help out in that area. A lot of the commentary I am hearing about the inclusion of Atom into these mini-notebooks is about the expected performance boost over current processors and I’m not sure that’s what we will get. I would love to hear from authorities who know about these things but the Atom as I understand it in its initial release is designed for Linux-based MIDs, not Windows-based devices. I haven’t seen any reason to think that the initial Atoms will be able to handle notebook types of devices so I’m not sure that the enthusiasm is a bit misplaced. Even Intel’s own information doesn’t mention Vista as a viable OS for the Atom. I hope I’m wrong about this and the extra battery life of Atom will be great but I don’t think we’ll see better performance running Vista and maybe not even XP.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
I agree the EEEPC Atom hype seems to be getting a little out of control. My take on the Atom is that it’s similar to the C7-M from VIA, but with possibly a lower power requirement.
I think you’ll need the dual core version to make a workable Vista machine. You might get XP running OK.
I’m currently more interested in the VIA Isaiah CPU which if dropped in the HP Mini would produce a nice machine. The Isaiah processor should be around twice as fast as a Atom of similar GHz, although it will used more power.
In a (mini) notebook, CPU performance is much more important than in the MID sector.
I’m one who values the battery life way more than the performance. I have a dual Xeon rig for my power requirements. When I’m out and about, a long-running machine is far more important.
Just give me the basics, and give them to me for 6-8 hours. And I want the HP keyboard, too.
And less than 20 seconds on boot time.
Oh, Foleo, where art though…
My thoughts exactly. I’m really not understanding all of this Atom hype, not for these mini notebooks, anyway.
Yes the Atom has an in-order pipeline like the C7-M, so it’s performance will be similar just with much much less power consumption. The Atom does have hyper-threading though, which will increase performance somewhat. I expect atom at 1.6Ghz to perform overall no better then in Celeron 900Mhz that is currently in the Eee PC.
In early tests, VIA’s Isaiah processor shows performance comparable to Intel’s Pentium-M/Core Solo processor, so I expect it to become the dominant CPU for mini-notebooks, if the price is comparable to the C7-M. It’s power consumption is rated at 30% less then the C7 and they have demostrated 1.2Ghz Isaiahs running passively cooled, so it seems to run much cooler then the C7.
In larger devices approaching laptop size, the CPU power consumption is a smaller percentage of the whole power consumption, with the larger LCD screen usually consuming the most power. In these cases, a higher-performance CPU is acceptable because the impact in battery life is less then what would occur in a device where the screen is so small that the CPU is the device consuming the most power.
Interesting that this post should almost coincide with this one:
http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1440
…which suggests the Atom will be much faster than expected. Quite a lot faster than the current Eee processor, faster than the OQO…
Interesting.
Note, that is the fastest Atom that will be produced and if I’m not mistaken not the one that will appear this summer. That aside it’s still not fast enough to run Vista in my opinion based on those benchmarks. It’s the same as the A110 which is only as good as a Celeron which doesn’t cut it.
I’m very interested in the battery life of these atoms, more so than the performance. It seems to perform quite well, better than the C7M and if it could provide much lower power consumption I can really recommend the Atomized HP mini note to people. I have a very sluggish ’05 Vaio TX which has a 1.2ghz Pentium M, 4200rpm HD and has a smaller keyboard but the Atomized HP seems to trump it at 1/4 the cost so it’s time for an upgrade. I know Sony can’t be happy about this.
I agree. The Atom isn’t going to be a BLAZING fast CPU, it will just provide better battery life for compacts laptops and other similar devices.
HP went with the VIA C7, which is not bad. The 1.6GHz version is known to provide good performance for Win Vista. However, the others that have the 1.2GHz CPU sound like they will have better performance on the GNU/Linux Suse.
If any of you are interested you can join http://www.eeeuser.com or http://www.mininoteuser.com. Both good user forums for the discussion of UMPCs like the ones above and the hardware used in them.
You describe your old Vaio as “very sluggish”. Do you realize that the Atom is much slower than a 1.2 GHz Pentium M? This is why I am convinced based on actual experience with mobile devices that the Atom will not provide a good performance experience on Windows Vista based devices.
Atom was designed for low-end MIDs running Linux designed to do nothing more than web work. Full-featured laptops or similar devices will tax the heck out of the Atom.
In my case the 4200RPM hard drive is probably the bottleneck, and it shows because it takes around 5 minutes to boot up. It also only has 1gb of ram. I think the 7200rpm will make a world of a difference in boot up.