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Intel Atom Dual Core is out!

B

bestassembler

Banned
Happened to came across a simple review on an unknown site, but it was about the huge...
First ever Atom dual core, in name of 330, is tested, although a little. Saw the box, the board...Exciting. Guess the retail will soon surface in market.

And guess what! Intel glued two atom on a single chip to make it atom dual core. Wow! Another time. I guess this time it won't matter much to the performance though.

http://uneit.com/2008/09/05/in...-atom-330-performance/

http://uneit.com/2008/09/07/atom-dual-core-a330-photo/


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I'm more interested in Intel producing a chipset that doesn't ruin any power advantages Atom has. Right now an AMD 2000+ and 780G board uses less power. And it's significantly faster than the atom in many respects.

 
Originally posted by: nerp
I'm more interested in Intel producing a chipset that doesn't ruin any power advantages Atom has.
Click to expand...
That is indeed an amazing oversight on Intel's part.

I'm assuming that the chipset power issue only applies to desktops, not netbooks. Else how would one account for fantastic netbook sales.

 
Originally posted by: 21stHermit
I'm assuming that the chipset power issue only applies to desktops, not netbooks. Else how would one account for fantastic netbook sales.
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, all of the currently available netbooks with the Atom are running that same 90nm 945GSE chipset.

edit: Welcome to anandtech, bestassembler.
 
I assembled an Atom-based PC using an Intel BOXD945GCLF motherboard last week. With 1GB of RAM and a 500GB HD, I have it running Vista Ultimate (turned off Aero) and an ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI and it makes a good HD Tivo using Vista Media Center's guide and my over-the-air antenna. It works fine for Netflix movies-on-demand and it plays iTunes downloaded movies (we've watched Lost on it in that pseudo-HD that iTunes uses). You can watch YouTube videos just fine. There's a bit of lag on some things - especially starting up Media Center for the first time but it's really not that bad. With a super small 80W mini-ITX power supply, it uses about 46W idling, and around 55W full load. This is a huge improvement over the 90W idle and 125W load that I had one my Celeron system doing the same job.

While it's definitely way slower than my primary Core 2 Duo computer, saying that the performance is so awful that you can't view Flash and Java sites is a bit misleading. I'm sure there's websites that will slow it down a lot but overall, it's very usable, it's cheap and it's pretty frugal on power and makes a pretty good HTPC (except for the lack of DVI).

My biggest complaint is the noise of the chipset fan... but the case it's in is small and looks good, and my wife is gradually getting the hang of using a remote control to navigate Media Center and is starting to like the set up.

I wonder what uses that I have been doing could benefit much from another core... I guess it could speed a few things up...
 
Originally posted by: pm
I wonder what uses that I have been doing could benefit much from another core... I guess it could speed a few things up...
Click to expand...

Well, it would be the same as it is for all other dual-core processors. For your uses, the additional core would be able to handle decoding the content, while the first core handled Windows, Media Center + audio and video, or whatever combination gave the best distribution across the cores. For web browsing and the like, it would obviously make zero difference
 
No,it doesn't. It does 720p - from HD recordings OTA - but I tried 1080p on my LCD monitor and it did a horrible job. Somehow 720p looks great, but 1080p has so many dropped frames that it's unacceptable.
 
doesn't a dual core of atom defeat the whole purpose of atom? unless they engineered a much lower power consuming and heat producing chip?

Originally posted by: pm
No,it doesn't. It does 720p - from HD recordings OTA - but I tried 1080p on my LCD monitor and it did a horrible job. Somehow 720p looks great, but 1080p has so many dropped frames that it's unacceptable.
Click to expand...

uhm what format was the 1080p video file in? mkv? a lot of it also has to do with how it was decoded and what codecs/filters and media player you are playing/decoding it with.

h.264 can be software decoded with good performance with things like CoreAVC.
 
Originally posted by: minmaster
doesn't a dual core of atom defeat the whole purpose of atom? unless they engineered a much lower power consuming and heat producing chip?
Click to expand...

No, how could it? How could ~doubling the performance of your CPU for an extra 1 watt @ idle, and 4 watts @ 100% load be a bad thing, or defeating it's purpose?
 
Originally posted by: minmaster
doesn't a dual core of atom defeat the whole purpose of atom? unless they engineered a much lower power consuming and heat producing chip?

.
Click to expand...

If they engineered it to dual core standard and the same or only a couple watts more I would deem it a success and not defeating the purpose. Most of the mini-itx setups with AMD Geods, Via, and the shitty Intel Cely's need more processing power.

I'm running Server 08 on a AMD Geode 1.5 with 512mb ram, I would enjoy an extra core if I have to take a 5 watt hit with it. That might bring the whole cpu up to 10 watts at the most.
 
Originally posted by: 21stHermit
Originally posted by: nerp
I'm more interested in Intel producing a chipset that doesn't ruin any power advantages Atom has.
Click to expand...
That is indeed an amazing oversight on Intel's part.

I'm assuming that the chipset power issue only applies to desktops, not netbooks. Else how would one account for fantastic netbook sales.
Click to expand...

what does real performance have to do with SALES?..
Marketing trumps knowledge.

read the links... the heat sink + FAN = north bridge...
the passively cooled heatsink by itself = atom CPU.
 
Originally posted by: taltamir
what does real performance have to do with SALES?..
Marketing trumps knowledge.
Click to expand...
Perhaps for the masses, but the whole point of these forums is knowledge. People who care enough to educate themselves and make informed choices.

That's why I'm here, how about you?

 
you misunderstood me. I said thats why the masses are purchasing it.. I always say that I am here to teach and learn. My point was, that you said what amounted to "if it was really that bad they wouldn't be selling them/buying them for notebooks, right?" which I replied with the note about the masses being ignorant, and you placing too much faith in humanity..

As said before, intel made a low power chipset, but the availability is non existent right now. I think the new iphone uses it. but not the laptops.

Intel is also working on a SIS chip, System on Silcone. A single chip that is an atom cpu, a north bridge, and a south bridge and a bit of ram on a single chip. It will be an extremely low power solution for having atom level performance in a cell phone.
 
Not sure why they make a dual core out of Atom, the whole idea of the thing is to save power and not up the performances.
 
AFAIK the atom was meant to take under 1 watt, but only the 800mhz version gets there... most are 2 watts instead. a dual core atom is still only 4 watts. The chipset is much much more. that is still a LOT less then the northbridge which takes about 10 times as much. So it makes sense to give twice the performance with only a few percent more overall system power consumption. that is, until intel can ramp up production of polsebo. and even the polsebo is wasting too much power, being made at 130nm...

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...owdoc.aspx?i=3276&p=20

the 800MHz atom is only 0.65W
with the 1.8ghz one taking 2.4watt

A dual core 1.8ghz would thus be 4.8 watts... less then a typical HDD. And only a 1/10th of a common north bridge.

 
I think the new iphone uses it. but not the laptops.
Click to expand...
The iPhone uses a Samsung S5L8900 ARM 1176 processor and PowerVR MBX 3D graphics co-processor.
 
Originally posted by: nyker96
Not sure why they make a dual core out of Atom, the whole idea of the thing is to save power and not up the performances.
Click to expand...

Which is less power consumption - a single-core Atom at 1.8GHz or a dual-core atom at 900 MHz?

It makes sense for those apps which are multi-threaded as they will not require the GHz to get the job done.

Combine a dual-core atom with a nehalem-type core sleep capability and a nehalem-type turbo capability and things could get juicy.

Your 900MHz dual-core atom could shut-off one core and run the other one at 1.8GHz to power thru single-threaded apps when a given app exceeds 50% processor utilization, and then if more than 1 single-threaded app starts using >40% CPU utilization then power up the second processor, drop the GHz on both processors and run the single-threads on them (or if a multi-thread app has threads which are compute intensive).
 
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