Intel's Atom D510, D410 processors get benchmarked
By Donald Melanson 
posted December 11th 2009 6:57PM
posted December 11th 2009 6:57PM
Intel's Pine Trail may not be out in full force just yet, but it looks like German website CarTFT has gotten ahold of a couple of Intel's latest processor / motherboard combos (intended primarily for nettops) and gone ahead and published a few early benchmarks. As you may have expected, however, the boards don't exactly represent a huge leap over current systems in terms of performance -- especially when compared to an Atom 330 processor paired with an Ion chipset. Indeed, the Atom 330 / Ion pairing actually beat out both the Atom D510 and D410 in a number of real-world Windows 7 performance tests, although the new Atoms did of course come out top when it came to raw processor performance. Then again, the new boards do also both come in at under $100, and they each boast some reasonably good improvements in power consumption, which should be enough to get plenty of folks to overlook look a few shortcomings.
Now we need some N450 benchmarks. I really want to see whether Pine Trail will be worth the wait.
So the power consumption of this is lest than the previous Atoms, but by how much exactly? Comparison of power consumption to performance would be nice.
@Paul "As for power consumption, both the D510 and D410 ‘boards pull in 33W and 26W at peak and idle, respectively, compared to 40-45W from the Atom 330/945GC pairing." So it looks like an interesting power consumption reduction, while the performance boost was minimal. Remember that these are nettop not netbook (usually) chips, so they're comparing to the Dual Core Atom 330.
It will be more interesting to see numbers for the netbook versions vs. N and Z-series Atom CPUs.
No HDMI and no hardware video decoding means these boards are useless for all but the most basic computing tasks. Forget about HD video of any sort - streaming flash or local h.264.
Pinetrail is more of the same. Why can't Intel understand that even netbook/nettop users might want to watch some HD Hulu or Youtube?
@Chip The Z-series Atom's can ALREADY handle HD video decoding, and with the upcoming release of Flash 10.1 will be able to handle "HD" flash as well. The N-series Atom's cannot, but PineTrail will be at least as good as the Z-series.
@Chip
Because the goal for these chips isn't to make cheap laptops, its to compete with ARM in the mobile space. Intel would rather sell you a CULV which can handle HD video from YouTube and Blu-ray.
Notice how Atom chips are moving towards more of a system-on-chip approach with the GPU, memory controller, and CPU on the same chip. The next logical step is to integrate everything on die and then shrink it to where it can fit into a cellphone. This AnandTech article from 2008 provides some good info: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3254&p=1
@Fanfoot No, they can't. The Z-series chips offload video decoding to the GMA500 GPU in the Poulsbo chipset. Even that is only capable of 720p.
The N and D series Atoms use even weaker GPUs. Both of these new D series chips use the GMA3150, which is a slightly modified version of the antiquated GMA3100. It has no hardware accelerated media decoding whatsoever. Pinetrail is using the same thing.
My Atom N270 can handle HD h.264 pretty decently with the cccp codecs (not sure what they use). CoreAVC codecs are supposed to be much better though (not free AFAIK).
Flash is a different story, but flash eats donkey shit, I've had somewhat simple flash games use up an entire core on my Q6600 (at 3Ghz).
@YuriTenshi
Because software decoding can only do so much, and Adobe sucks and writing efficient software.
Is the D510 chip dual core? And if so, is it dual core like the Core 2 Duos or is like the Atom 330 chip 2 single core N230's put together?
Well, this was to be expected. After all, it is an Intel GMA on the same chip as an Atom, you cant expect miracles.
I'm hoping for some netbooks with switchable Intel/Nvidia graphics, as the GMA's are quite simply crap for anything even remotely graphics heavy.
@Nitesh Side note, Via, strike NOW.
I was really hoping for a nice speed increase. I just set up a really nice slim vaio x laptop however it was painfully slow. Just copying files to the hard drive maxes out the CPU and it was a 2.0 GHz atom. I think the new atoms are even slower cycle speed.
i need benchmarks for a massive atom cluster. with processing power vs wattage comparisons.
@vlad the inhaler The Core 2 Duo actually has a higher performance per watt rating than the Atom, so for a cluster I imagine that would be better.
I want to see the comparison to AMD's offerings as found in the ZinoHD, comparing power and benchmarks. From what I've seen they just look like a better choice and it would be interesting to see some more netbooks with those chips. I would think competition would be good here.
Honey, when you come home would you drop by the store and pick up a few nettops? The neighbors are coming over.
WE'RE ALMOST AT THAT POINT. $60 and counting.
Not a word about battery life...
@kingu Nettops plugs on wall sockets, never uses batteries (cept the bios, and the bios battery takes few years to drain)
@(Unverified) The N330 is also a desktop processor, and it ended up in netbooks nonthelesss, my guess is this will too and that speedstep will be its main advantage when performance isn't that different.
Keep in mind, Intel's trying to keep Atom from competing with CULV, and keep Atom down in the MID/UMPC space they originally intended for it, and for third world countries that don't care about performance, as long as it's a computer.
meh dont care about HD video hulu ? what hulu? I never even go on youTube and no way Im intslling abobe crapoflash thingy .Drop the price for that lil baby and Im all over it
@ainsi10
I found it here http://www.mini-box.com/D510MO-mini-ITX-Intel it's ~$100. What I like on this motherboard, beside Pine Trail CPU, it's a miniPCI express socket (I could put the Broadcom Crystal HD in it), it's fanless and what I don't liek it's the lack of HDMI port, only VGA :( and I can't use it at full capacity as a HD HTPC. But for a silent and fanless nettop with the right enclosure, it's a good motherboard.
If only D510 had ION2 support.
Why no PCI-Express 16x ?