Bay Trail's not so bad... (N2830)

[Shivansps]

Sorry, I think I misinterpreted your post here. When you said "mm no really" I thought you were disagreeing and giving links as to why, but you were probably saying "mm no really" meaning you didn't have many comparisons easily ready either. My mistake.

Most of the stuff I do is still single-threaded (I think Firefox still is, mostly?), but considering that Intel themselves label the Haswell as a Celeron and the Atom as a Pentium, they may also feel that the Atom Pentium is better (or at least just as good as the Haswell Celeron) in general, as you say. I wouldn't mind a Quark laptop, I still have MS-DOS and some games that can run on 386. :awe:

They did it because of the bad rep atom brand got in mobile and desktop, the MT performance is high enoght for N3540 to be a choice for a non gaming device, because its fanless and low power, i do agree the price should be lower.

The problem here are mostly the dual core BTs, that is something that it should not exist, and it does not on tablets.

Yes, a lot of stuff is ST, but people does not do one thing at a time, for something like 10 to 20% ST perf to matter at all, people generally opens 2 or 3 browser tabs(not sure about firefox but chrome opens 1 process per tab), skype, and if they are working its even more, so they all stack up on dual cores, Windows just have 2 more cores to assing process to in a quad, thats a fact, so MT also matters for everyday use.

 

[coercitiv]

20% slower? See the benchmarks from this page.

I did, do you have a better figure to describe how much slower BT Pentium is versus HW Celeron?

How about MT loads, would you consider the 50% faster estimate to be accurate?

 

[coercitiv]

The problem here are mostly the dual core BTs, that is something that it should not exist, and it does not on tablets.

Agree, they are good for a NAS though

 

[Seba]

I did, do you have a better figure to describe how much slower BT Pentium is versus HW Celeron?

A Haswell Celeron has more than double ST performance than Bay Trail at the same clock.

Here is a comparison between a Bay Trail-D 2,4/2,58GHz and a Ivy Bridge Celeron 2,7GHz.

 

[dahorns]

A Haswell Celeron has more than double ST performance than Bay Trail at the same clock.

Here is a comparison between a Bay Trail-D 2,4/2,58GHz and a Ivy Bridge Celeron 2,7GHz.

He wasn't comparing them clock for clock. Obviously, Haswell is much better at that. But here, the comparison is between two products, one a Silvermont with high clock, the other a Haswell/Ivybridge with much lower clock speed.

 

[jpiniero]

You're comparing a 55W model though. The 15W Haswell Celerons have half the clock speed. One thing is that Atom at this point don't support any vector unit; so it's obviously going to suffer compared to Haswell U if it uses SSE at all.

 

[Seba]

He wasn't comparing them clock for clock. Obviously, Haswell is much better at that. But here, the comparison is between two products, one a Silvermont with high clock, the other a Haswell/Ivybridge with much lower clock speed.

It started from this post:

You are HORRIBLE WRONG, dont forget i have a Z3735D tablet and a E-350 notebook, and you know what? they both have almost the same ST perf, the Z3735D stumps my E-350 netbook for everyday usage. And in games it depends, some run better in the E-350 because of the igp, some run better in the Z3735D because of the cpu. And thats even considering that the netbook has 3Gb of ram and the tablet only 2GB.

E-350 1,6GHz
Z3735D 1,33/1,83 GHz

So close to clock for clock comparison.

 

[waltchan]

What about Pentium J2900? It's the fastest and best Silvermont tablet processor available from Intel, usually found in desktops, and priced around $400 on average.

CPU benchmark score says 2080 total from all 4 cores, but single-thread is only 602.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+J2900+@+2.41GHz

Let's see, to match Pentium J2900 single-thread score, this is a Sandy-Bridge Celeron 857 1.2 GHz from 2011, but with 2 cores missing.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+857+@+1.20GHz

 

[dahorns]

It started from this post:


E-350 1,6GHz
Z3735D 1,33/1,83 GHz

So close to clock for clock comparison.

Uh, no it didn't. The discussion started with a comparison of the Baytrail Celeron vs Haswell Celeron. Shivansps then said:

Im not sure if a 2.66ghz BT is slower than a 1.4Ghz Haswell, as i said is almost double frecuency, if the ST performance is anywhere near as a result of that its gona be considerable faster.

AMD's E-350 was only brought up to discuss a subpoint; given two processors of nearly the same single-core performance, the one with more cores will perform better.

No one ever suggested that Baytrail and Haswell have similar single-threaded performance clock-per-clock. That would be stupid and obviously incorrect.

 

[Picao84]

I've recently bought an ACER 11.6 inch laptop with Pentium N3540 to replace an old first generation (Arrandale?) Core i5. Since I got myself a desktop PC it was pointless for me to have a powerful notebook. I bought this laptop mostly to replace an old ASUS Transformer tablet, since Android does not cut it for me if I need to do some work on the move.

Let me say I was pleasantly surprised! The laptop is very light, fanless, noiseless (especially after I replaced the HDD with an SSD) and fast enough. Boots in a few seconds and is extremely rare for it to crawl into a standstill. It only happened once when a chrome tab stopped working. I even tried to use PCSX2 (PS2 emulator for those who do not know) and it worked well enough with FPS between 50 and 60 on native resolution. I tried to scale up to HD but FPS would drop to 20-30. But that is because of the slow GPU. Nevertheless that was just to see how far it went, since I did not buy this machine to play games.

In my opinion, Bay Trail in Pentium N3540 form is a clear winner for the market of people who only need a computer to browse the web and office apps, with good battery life (7h+). Of course the hardcore enthusiast (and I also have a faster Haswell/nVIDIA desktop) will ditch these processors, but they are very good for what they are.

 

[waltchan]

In my opinion, Bay Trail in Pentium N3540 form is a clear winner for the market of people who only need a computer to browse the web and office apps, with good battery life (7h+). Of course the hardcore enthusiast (and I also have a faster Haswell/nVIDIA desktop) will ditch these processors, but they are very good for what they are.

If you have the chance to test Pentium 3558U 1.7 GHz Haswell notebook processor, you'll be even more delighted. Battery life is going to be less than Pentium N3540, but the sweet 979 single-thread score in 3558U is almost double the performance from 545 in N3540.

 

[Seba]

Uh, no it didn't. The discussion started with a comparison of the Baytrail Celeron vs Haswell Celeron. Shivansps then said:

I meant my intervention in this thread started as a reply to that post.

 

[Picao84]

If you have the chance to test Pentium 3558U 1.7 GHz Haswell notebook processor, you'll be even more delighted. Battery life is going to be less than Pentium N3540, but the sweet 979 single-thread score in 3558U is almost double the performance from 545 in N3540.

I think sometimes people forget we are talking about a laptop here. Battery life is rather important. For what I do with it (browse web, Office Apps, watch movies), Bay Trail offers enough performance. Considering that, why would I change it for an Haswell, since in my use case it would not offer me nothing else than what Bay Trail already offers, with less batttery life, fan noise and warmer chasis to boot? I did not buy a laptop to run benches, I bought it to fulfil my needs

EDIT - The only bench I would be interested in, on this case, would be precisely battery life. And it feels quite good to see Windows complaining about 15% battery life, but mouseover and see its saying "1:15" left

 

[Seba]

You have to wait longer for Bay Trail. Get a Haswell and get the job done faster.

 

[Picao84]

You have to wait longer for Bay Trail. Get a Haswell and get the job done faster.

Seriously? Wait longer? In my use case? For what? Especially after I put an SSD on it? You don't know what you are talking about, do you? I'm even telling you this thing can run a PS2 emulator fine, which is already a quite intensive computing task (my old Arrandale Core i5 would not fare that much better).. Much more intensive than loading webpages, run Office Apps and play movie which is 99% of what I do with it.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Actually the thread got re-opened by a poster who claimed atoms are "fake" processors for laptops and desktops. Not sure why we are arguing on and on in response this post.

 

[waltchan]

Actually the thread got re-opened by a poster who claimed atoms are "fake" processors for laptops and desktops. Not sure why we are arguing on and on in response this post.

Yep, that's me. I call them "fake" because it doesn't look right to use a small tablet processor for notebook and big-o desktop computers. If you don't know what "tablet" means, it means nano-size processor design for low-demand applications while maximizing battery-life rather than performance, and that's what Silvermont defines.

A Haswell, regular notebook processor is the "genuine" size for laptop computers (minimum Celeron 2955U).

 

[waltchan]

Seriously? Wait longer? In my use case? For what? Especially after I put an SSD on it? You don't know what you are talking about, do you? I'm even telling you this thing can run a PS2 emulator fine, which is already a quite intensive computing task (my old Arrandale Core i5 would not fare that much better).. Much more intensive than loading webpages, run Office Apps and play movie which is 99% of what I do with it.

Due to Bay-Trail's limitation, only up to SATA II 3.0GB/PS is supported. Are you sure you're getting the full solid-state performance?

In Haswell, SATA III 6.0GB/PS is supported, which is more solid-state friendly.

 

[seitur]

You are HORRIBLE WRONG, dont forget i have a Z3735D tablet and a E-350 notebook, and you know what? they both have almost the same ST perf, the Z3735D stumps my E-350 netbook for everyday usage. And in games it depends, some run better in the E-350 because of the igp, some run better in the Z3735D because of the cpu. And thats even considering that the netbook has 3Gb of ram and the tablet only 2GB.

So a device powered with 4 threaded 2014 CPU with weak-to-average Single Thread Perfomance (Bay-Trail) provide better user experience than other device powered by 2011 2 threaded CPU with weak-to-average Single Thread Performance (Bobcat) and that somehow make me "HORRIBLY WRONG" that average user will have better user experience with a device powered by 2 threaded CPU with Strong Single Thread Performance (Haswell) than with 4 Threaded CPU with weak-to-average single thread performance (Bay-Trail)?

 

[waltchan]

We're comparing two different CPU architectures here, Silvermont (tablet-size) processors vs. Haswell (notebook-size) processors, that do have a large impact in performance. More threads and higher frequency speed don't mean much. We need 4.0 GHz Bay-Trail to match 1.4 GHz Haswell.

 

[Seba]

I also noticed this horrible trend to replace Haswell entry level laptops with Bay Trail laptops. It is increasingly difficult to find a low price laptop with Celeron Haswell or with Pentium Haswell. We are flooded with Bay Trail offerings.

 

[touchstone]

well they have to do something with them i guess and they aren't gonna sell them if pentiums and celerons are available at the same price. its really dumb because the celerons and pentiums are actually very good processors while the bay trail replacements are pretty darn terrible. i don't think its even possible for a bay trail to compete with a >2Ghz haswell and now core m is here. but they seem to be pricing it way outside of the 300-400 range.

 

[waltchan]

I also noticed this horrible trend to replace Haswell entry level laptops with Bay Trail laptops. It is increasingly difficult to find a low price laptop with Celeron Haswell or with Pentium Haswell. We are flooded with Bay Trail offerings.

Because PC makers are more interested in buying the cheapest parts, cheapest processors, cheapest LED screens, no DVD drive, and etc. than performance. A Celeron Bay Trail is almost half the price of Celeron Haswell when ordering large bulk quantities from Intel.

Before Bay Trail came out, Ivy Bridge Celeron once dominated the low-price laptop market with 1007U, 1017U, and 1037U during 2013. They were more-expensive than Bay Trail, with minimum price set at $269.99 on average.

Now the Bay Trail Celeron N2800 dual-core and N2900 quad-core series are here, that's where laptop prices successfully reach below $200 for the first time ever. Production is now up 70% more than Ivy Bridge Celeron, and cost is around 65% lower. Great for bargain consumers, more profit for Intel. It's a win-win for both.

Because of the appealing "quad-core" word in Bay Trail than "dual-core" in Haswell, retailers are charging more for the Celeron N2940 than Celeron 2957U, and Pentium N3540 than Pentium 3558U at this moment. In case too many Bay Trail PCs were produced, they sell for a little less than Haswell to clear up space in warehouse.

 

[Picao84]

Due to Bay-Trail's limitation, only up to SATA II 3.0GB/PS is supported. Are you sure you're getting the full solid-state performance?

In Haswell, SATA III 6.0GB/PS is supported, which is more solid-state friendly.

I am fully aware of that and honestly, again, for the use case I explained, SATA II or III is meaningless. An SSD on a SATA II interface already offers a huge boost to performance compared to an HDD. There is something called "good enough" and reaching that is one of the reasons for the slow down of the PC market. Put someone who does not know anything about PCs browsing the web on Bay Trail and a low power Haswell. They most probably would not spot the difference, as long as both systems have an SSD. Even me, with a desktop Haswell Core i5, struggle to see the diference when doing simple tasks, nevermind "common folk".

Yes, any enthusiast will see that Haswell is better than BayTrail.. and it better be since it has the price to justify it! Now, not everyone is an enthusiast or needs that much computing power. For those people Bay Trail is enough. I know people who did not even get a quad core BayTrail but a dual core Celeron and are happy with it. And some came from an older Sandy Bridge Core i3.. oh the blasfemy

 

[Shivansps]

About battery, OEMs also goes with smaller bats for BT devices, so, its something you need to check device by device.

So a device powered with 4 threaded 2014 CPU with weak-to-average Single Thread Perfomance (Bay-Trail) provide better user experience than other device powered by 2011 2 threaded CPU with weak-to-average Single Thread Performance (Bobcat) and that somehow make me "HORRIBLY WRONG" that average user will have better user experience with a device powered by 2 threaded CPU with Strong Single Thread Performance (Haswell) than with 4 Threaded CPU with weak-to-average single thread performance (Bay-Trail)?

if you where right, there should be no difference at all, if in NO WAY we use 4 cores in a daily basics i shouldt be seeing any difference in a quad vs dual of the same ST perf.

The thing is, there is always load on all 4 cores because Windows is very good at assigning tasks, so unless all you do is do 1 thing at the time you will be always better in a quad with a considerable MT lead than in a dual with about 20% more ST perf, for the simple fact that its likely that the "20% extra" will be used in some other thing anyway in a dual.

A very different thing is if we are talking about games, until DX12 at least, ST perf is always better.