Everyone wants a new generation ultra-portable pumping the
Atom processor right? After all, it's Intel's latest and greatest
Centrino proc. Not so fast... literally.
Impress got their hands on an unofficially released MSI Wind PC (the mini-PC, not the
low-cost laptop) and subjected the 1.33GHz Atom processor to a suite of standard tests. While the source is in machine-translated Japanese, that table comparing the Atom with Eee PC 900's Celeron and a typical
ULV Core 2 Duo found in a wide range of full-sized, ultra-portable laptops speaks for itself. Keep in mind though that Intel's Atom is supposed to be less power hungry than its peers and CPU benchmarking is hardly the last word when it comes to determining real-world laptop performance -- read/writes to disk, memory, and other system nuances must also be considered. Nevertheless, based on this table and other
mounting evidence, first and second generation Eee PC owners shouldn't feel any compulsion to rush out and upgrade to Atom on day 1.
[Via
Technophone and
Notebook Italia]
posted May 21st 2008 5:48AM
I'm not sure how the graphics score was different in the EEEs seeing they both use exactly the same chip (and excluding the screen, everything else as well)
because the CPU is faster, therefore less latency in commands received. Anyway imagine comparing a Pentium 4 with a x1950 agp verus a Core 2 Quad 9300 with a x1950 pci-e. I'm sure you'll agree the 9300 will get better frame rates.
I'm waiting for the next-gen "Blows PC".
This might be a dumb question, but is it possible that the CPU score was lower on the Wind due to Vista?
No.
Or possibly yes.
Very well maybe.
There should be speed/watt table, then ATOM would probably come on top,
ATOM is *much* slower then Celeron, but is also much less power hungry about ~2 Watts!
I don't think so because PCMark scores tend to be higher on Vista (look at other review, it really is :))
I have a question under those system nuances does operating system affect the performance because the Wind is running vista compared to the eee pc's XP
Wont things like RAM and FSB speeds change these results though, I understand that CPU score shouldnt be affected by RAM, but it doesnt say what setup they are on
Perhaps the different score on the Eee PC's is caused by the RAM. (More memory assigned to the graphics...)
First thing I notice :)
Why are the memory scores different?
why is the MSI Wind with 1GB of DDR2 @333Mhz better then then the ASUS EeePC 900 with 1 GB of DDR2 @400Mhz.
still need to see a multi-threaded application test for the Atom.
Ever heard of latency?
FSB
wind 533Mhz
Eeepc 400Mhz
@CosterMonger: wouldn't the slower RAM cause a bottleneck though since it doesn't match the Wind PC's FSB?
As some others have stated, I'm curious if Vista could have held the MSI Wind's scores back a tad bit. I know from experience that PCMark scores can very by a couple hundred points between Vista and XP.
anyhow...the Atom on Wind seems to be a 1.33 and not a 1.6...and it seems other than consumptions its taking hell of a beat from 900 MHZ celeron
This is a totally skewed test, NONE of the 4 machines had the same OS or ram. We all know that vista is a ram hog and vista needs 2 GB ram to run averagely. The atom is tested with 1 GB of ram.
I'm not pro or against Atom, this test is worthless unless its in a controlled environment.
For everyone complaining about the unfair comparisons because of differences between OSes, this is a review of the whole system, not the processor.
I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure that its been common knowledge that the Atom processor is slower than a Celeron 900 for quite awhile. I distinctly remember discussions about it on other forums.
That was speculation though because neither Marty nor KingJoeDoom had gotten their hands on an Atom yet.
It's been common knowledge even here, people just like to ignore that fact or something.
and wth is that HDD score?? seems too unrealistic...
Yeah, what kind of a hard drive did they put in that thing?
The Wind has a standard 2.5" hard drive, so of course it beats the crappy SSD in the EEE and the pathetic 1.8" drive in the TZ.
The hard drive may well be a 3.5", seeing that this is a ultra-compact desktop type and not a subnotebook.
Narrowly extrapolating from the CPU Score, a 1.6 GHz Atom would be roughly equivalent to a Core 2 Duo running at 600 MHz. (1159 / 2832 / 1.33 * 1.6) * 100% = 49.2%.
Intel have already stated a while back that the 1.6ghz atom will perform around the same mark as a 800mhz celeron ulv in single threaded performance. Its approximately half as fast at the same clock speed. This is because the die of the chip is considerably simpler and executes in order.
But the Atom processor supports 2 threads (via hyperthreading) which should offset this limitation somewhat.
Remember, atom works at a 2.2 watts tdp (with hyperthreading) while the existing celeron 353 in the eee 900 works at 5 watts. If hypertheading does boost performance then atom will give better performance per watt... which is the point.
The low-power argument for the Atom is more relevant for smaller (hand-held) form-factors than it is for subnotebooks, let alone for ultracompact PCs (which are AC-powered). CPU power consumption is only of many factors for a x86 general-purpose device.
Even assuming that web browsing will be the dominant use for the LCUPs, low-power will need to be offset by substantially longer battery life for the trade-off to be worthwhile. Web page rendering is getting more CPU-bound with more use of Flash & animation.
That's a good analysis, but it won't help the Atom when it comes to consumer products since the cpu is just one piece.
In other words, if the Atom has a good perf/power ratio, but it takes longer to perform the task, you've probably just wasted the Atom's thrifty power savings keeping the rest of the system functioning during the wait (lcd, backlighting, spinning drive, fans, etc.). That's why Intel is focused on the entire platforrm (so they can similarly optimize the other subsystems that they have dominion over). But, unless they're going to actually build the unit themselves (not sure, are they?), they won't have control over every other power draining subsystem in there.
Meh, the Atom isn't significantly slower than the Celeron in the 900 Eee, and is faster than the Celeron in the 701, which wasn't too bad. More importantly, the 701 got burning hot even with its tiny buzzing fan. If the Atom is going to have significantly reduced heat production, I'm all for it.
Pretty interesting that they are using the Silverthorne for the Wind PC and not the Diamondville, which should be way cheaper.
I would like to see these benchmarks on the Diamondville, too just to see how it compares to the Silverthorne.
Compared to these crystalmark benchmarks:
http://www.eeepcnews.de/2008/04/18/intel-atom-benchmarks-via-isaiah-vergleich/
i am sure we won't see a big difference between these 2 Atom versions
because Diamondville isn't out yet.
isn't the HDD score for the eeepc so low becos of it's low capacity?
No
I don't know about them, but if I had to do a benchmark, I'd make sure there is as less as possible in configurations, to avoid some variables. Evaluating some PC under Windows XP and some under Windows Vista might cause some differences, so this could be biased.
But what about the battery life benchmarks, hmmm?
(where's my all-day computer, dammit)
As already stated I think having vista on there is a terrible idea...
why can't i get a ULV processor for my desktop!?!?!
Is this really a fair test system? Really, the types of tasks to be done on these machines is not going to be maxing them out like this. Take that trade off with the low power consumption and presumably better battery life and I would then take an Atom over the celeron.
Lets look at target audience and use here, not benchmarks.
This is a pointless benchmarking test that should be ignored.
Atom in the MSI Wind Laptop(not desktop) will be 1.6ghz which will be slightly better than the Celeron in the currently available EEE 900 series. All of the machines above should of had XP as the OS too.
When the MSI Wind notebook is tested, then we will see.
"first and second generation Eee PC owners shouldn't feel any compulsion to rush out and upgrade to Atom on day 1."
...except for battery life I would say.
i have a question about this atom
is this the "celeron atom"?
because i read an article couple days ago and saw something about a celeron atom
Still getting the Wind Laptop. You can't stop me Engadget :P
Battery times for the portables will be so much more interesting, as it is the single most important factor for me.
I was really psyched about the Atom until recently. It will be great for battery life, but you have to go back a couple generations to find a CPU that it can beat clock-for-clock. I know it's all about low power, but I would at least expect them to beat a four-year-old Pentium M. Apparently that's too much to ask.
I was all set to buy an MSI Wind at launch, but I just picked up a used Thinkpad X-series notebook on eBay for the same price instead. It might weight half a pound more, but Core Duo still destroys Atom.
@Howard: I was thinking the same thing, picking up a X61. Lenovo had a clearance on the older version for around $800 last year (free shipping). This was with a 2.0 GHz Core2Duo, 2 gigs, and an 6-hr battery, all in a 4-lb package. Should've went for it, but didn't. Am hoping the deal will come around again.
I'm not looking to harness massive power here, I just want a light email/browser/office machine.
The table is missing two important rows: CPU power consumption and system price.
These results are bogus, how can you compare products if they are not running the same OS, put xp on all of them, or vista on all of them, and then run the tests.
@CosterMoster
Diamondville is available on the Intel Little Falls Mini-ITX board, so you can buy it ;)
CPU results are going to be improved, this is not the model they are going to release to the market. INTEL did not release Diamonville (Atom) chips yet, that's gonna be in June.
This one has Atom Z520, which is Silverthrone and that's single core. Why no one can wait for the real device and still use this one which is not quite the same as they are going to release?
Question:
Not really based on this article per say but when the Atom debuts in a low-cost laptop will I be able to comfortably have Outlook 2007, Word 2007, and iTunes all open/running at the same time? I'm a student so if it can't handle that much, they I'll have to look elsewhere. My ancient 2.6 Ghz Celeron/512 mb RAM/64 mb VidCard struggles with the above tasks (iTunes stutters/locks everything up) so that's my benchmark. What do you guys think about the Atom handling that much?
No.
Get more ram. That is your problem, not the CPU.
It depends... After this little laptop will have Diamonville version of Atom (Dual core) and with 1GB of RAM and maybe SSD drive it won't be a problem. I have several times burned AMD Athlon XP 2000+ and it still can do this kind of work without any big lag and I think that this very old machine would score lower comparing to Atom.
And I just suggest trying to avoid Outlook 2007, Office 2007 and iTunes. They are not going to offer you anything spectacular, only a nice GUI and that's all. And by choosing right software to do the job you would not have to waste more money for almost nothing. That was just the suggestion.
Well, benchmarks that I've seen put the Atom at around the same performance as a VIA C7-M per clock cycle, which is to say, about 50-60% the performance of a Celeron M at the same clock speed. The advantage of the Atom over the VIA chip is that it takes about half as much power at the same clock speed.
Point is, if you want to know what the Atom can do, have a look at low cost laptops running a Via chip.
I am a lifetime Apple user and I'm not afraid to say that iTunes has become a total joke. Get a real music player which doesn't use 90 percent of your CPU to play an MP3. iTunes is the most bloated, underperforming, overfeatured abomination in Apple history.
now we sit and wait for isaiah
Which has a much higher TDP than any of the ULV proccesors
TDP= heat not power consumption.
Low Graphic score of MSI WindPC compared to Sony laptop can be explained by usage of slower DDR2 memory - 333 against 400. Since they both use GMA 950 integrated graphics, and they both use part of system memory as videoram, slower RAM results in lower memory bandwidth. Of course, processor also has great influence.
Also, according to Wiki, different versions of 945 chipset have different clock speed - 945G,945GM,945G, 945GZ - it varies from 133 to 400 Mhz, which also affects the performance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA
Big HDD score of MSI Windpc is due to usage of 3,5" HDD (7200 rpm) against mobile 2,5"(4400\5400 rpm)