I gotta say I'm rather impressed with VIA. They got knocked to the bottom of the barrel of the CPU world by Intel and AMD, but instead of letting themselves die out, or forcing the other two to kill them off buy continuing a futile claw for the top, they said, hey let's thrive right here. And they're doing a pretty good job.
As far as what to do with low power/low power consumption processors, what do we do with our full power PCs now that we didn't do 3 - 4 years ago ? I can't really think of anything particularly important. Websurfing ? Word processing ? E-Mail ? IM ? VOIP ? Audio playback ? Video playback ? Video streaming ? P2P transfers ? Casual gaming ? Taxes ? Photo editing / printing ?
I used to do all those things on my P-III 450mhz system...and still do them (in various ways and at various times) on a Celeron 550mhz tablet and a Crusoe 800mhz based ultra portable laptop. They work fine. Of course, I'm not watching Blu-rays or playing Crysis on them, but in general they do fine...
My Barton core Athlon system (circa 2003) that I just retired was clock around 2.0 ghz but ran Vista Business (ie with Aero and such enabled) fine (not zippy, but totally usable). And with lighter OSs like WinXP or Win2K it flew. I could surf the web while copying movie DVDs (DVD9 -> DVD 5) or play Silent Hill 2/3, Halflife 2, or Doom 3 on it and it ran great.
If this new CPU has about that much power, which it sounds like it will, it should do pretty much anything you'd want to do on any kind of system you'd put a cpu like that into. I mean you're not gonna try to play Assasin's Creed on an OQO or the like, are you ?
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I gotta say I'm rather impressed with VIA. They got knocked to the bottom of the barrel of the CPU world by Intel and AMD, but instead of letting themselves die out, or forcing the other two to kill them off buy continuing a futile claw for the top, they said, hey let's thrive right here. And they're doing a pretty good job.
As far as what to do with low power/low power consumption processors, what do we do with our full power PCs now that we didn't do 3 - 4 years ago ? I can't really think of anything particularly important. Websurfing ? Word processing ? E-Mail ? IM ? VOIP ? Audio playback ? Video playback ? Video streaming ? P2P transfers ? Casual gaming ? Taxes ? Photo editing / printing ?
I used to do all those things on my P-III 450mhz system...and still do them (in various ways and at various times) on a Celeron 550mhz tablet and a Crusoe 800mhz based ultra portable laptop. They work fine. Of course, I'm not watching Blu-rays or playing Crysis on them, but in general they do fine...
My Barton core Athlon system (circa 2003) that I just retired was clock around 2.0 ghz but ran Vista Business (ie with Aero and such enabled) fine (not zippy, but totally usable). And with lighter OSs like WinXP or Win2K it flew. I could surf the web while copying movie DVDs (DVD9 -> DVD 5) or play Silent Hill 2/3, Halflife 2, or Doom 3 on it and it ran great.
If this new CPU has about that much power, which it sounds like it will, it should do pretty much anything you'd want to do on any kind of system you'd put a cpu like that into. I mean you're not gonna try to play Assasin's Creed on an OQO or the like, are you ?