The Atom love-in / confession thread. Do you like Atom-based hardware?

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ninaholic37

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2012
1,883
31
91
I get it. The thing is, advancements are such that a new Skylake chip can use the same or less power than the Atom and you can encode that file in 10 seconds and turn the machine off instead of the atom encoding for an hour and using power the whole time.

Makes you think.
Not really. I think you missed the part where patrol said cheap. The Core M devices I've seen are in the $900 range. Ridiculous!
 
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SAAA

Senior member
May 14, 2014
541
126
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Would it matter?

Has there ever been a big enough performance boost between Atom generations to actually turn "enough laggy to make you crazy" into a pleasurable computing experience?

(Not that I know of. :thumbsdown: )

Well one big jump for sure: Silvermont vs Saltwell.
Atom before was utterly unusable: I still have a single core netbook of that era and man if it's slow! It can barely run XP and Chrome with 50% usage on most sites and don't talk flash or videos because that's deadly...
Word, Excel etc yeah they run but that was possible on original Pentium too.
IGP too was crap until maybe Airmont I'd say, where they finally did the right thing and quadrupled(!) the EUs. That's fine enough for some light gaming, not 60fps sure but better than nothing.
 

Zodiark1593

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2012
2,230
4
81
Getting an RCA Windows 10 tablet pretty soon as a gift. The 2 GB of RAM has me concerned for Firefox use, however, it should otherwise be plenty for bedtime typing and video watching during excersise.
 

WildW

Senior member
Oct 3, 2008
986
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evilpicard.com
I had an N270 based netbook for surfing from the sofa, but much preferred the couple of Chromebooks I've had since. I did occasionally hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard at work and play some Unreal Tournament 2004 at lunchtimes, GMABooster to overclock the IGP.
 

Zodiark1593

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2012
2,230
4
81
For ~$130, the RCA Cambio 11 inch is of surprisingly good build quality. Performance out of the Atom Z3735F and 2 GB RAM is what you'd expect. Usable, but not enough for one's primary PC. The SSD is on the poky side unsurprisingly. An x86 PC that I can throw in a bag just like that, even with an Atom, is extremely versatile. The keyboard is quite good, if somewhat cramped, but the narrow, one touch trackpad on the keyboard gets my biggest gripe. Otherwise, great for just tossing on my bed to type stuff on. Edit: In a quick CPU-Z benchie, the quad Atom scores about 1/3 of my nearly 6-year old laptop (i5-560M, dual core).

Edit: In a quick CPU-Z benchie, the quad Atom scores about 1/3 of my nearly 6-year old laptop (i5-560M, dual core). :eek:
 
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jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
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I have an N270-based Asus netbook. It's complete crap. My Baytrail-based Asus netbook is significantly better.
 

partol

Junior Member
Apr 28, 2016
4
0
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I get it. The thing is, advancements are such that a new Skylake chip can use the same or less power than the Atom and you can encode that file in 10 seconds and turn the machine off instead of the atom encoding for an hour and using power the whole time.

When I encode video, I don't sit at my PC and wait for it to finish. I start the video and then do something else. In general, my PC's run 24/7, and I don't use hibernate, although I could. I have LED bulbs at home which run 24/7 because they only use 2 or 3 watts. Once the idle electricity consumption is below a tolerable amount, the user can simply never turn off the device (example: mobile phones), which to me, is a big plus. It's been years since I tried hibernate but I never liked it and always disable it. Perhaps I should give it another chance.
 

sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
Back in 2009, I bought a netbook with a single core atom cpu. one of the first atom cpu models. I was in awe at the low power consumption. This netbook at full load would consume less power than many desktops at idle. Even though it was much weaker than a desktop cpu, I did crazy things such as encode video on it. The cpu was so weak that I had to use google chrome for web browsing. At that time, most/all other browers were too demanding on a single core atom (with hyperthreading). Some/Many people dislike the atom, but I think they are wonderful. I like the concept of a tiny, minimalistic cpu which is cheap, energy efficient, and gets the x86/x64 job done. nothing fancy. bare bones. that's my kind of engineering :thumbsup:

In general, I like anything which is cheap and energy efficient such as athlons and Celerons and pentiums.

I got that one Sony X series. It was usable, barely. It was the world's lightest "laptop" but now I have a broadwell machine barely 100g heavier but runs circles around that thing.


Then I got a $100 Atom based tablet for $75. It's been quite a while since I've used a frustratingly slow computer and that thing reminded me of the old Win 98 days of waiting and waiting. Life is too short IMHO to be dealing with that when it's not really necessary. I'm sure even $300 laptops run perfectly decently these days. In theory it's a cool concept, I was thinking of use cases for it, maybe connect a USB DAC for remote music streaming. But today there are so many dedicated cheaper products running lighter software to do that.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,226
9,990
126
Would it matter?

Has there ever been a big enough performance boost between Atom generations to actually turn "enough laggy to make you crazy" into a pleasurable computing experience?

(Not that I know of. :thumbsdown: )

It goes faster for web browsing, if you disable / remove Flash Player, and use a wired ethernet connection, as I discovered with my Brix J1900 unit.

I don't think it rises to the level of "pleasurable computing", even with an Intel SSD, but it's bearable. It doesn't make me crazy.
 

Zodiark1593

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2012
2,230
4
81
I got that one Sony X series. It was usable, barely. It was the world's lightest "laptop" but now I have a broadwell machine barely 100g heavier but runs circles around that thing.


Then I got a $100 Atom based tablet for $75. It's been quite a while since I've used a frustratingly slow computer and that thing reminded me of the old Win 98 days of waiting and waiting. Life is too short IMHO to be dealing with that when it's not really necessary. I'm sure even $300 laptops run perfectly decently these days. In theory it's a cool concept, I was thinking of use cases for it, maybe connect a USB DAC for remote music streaming. But today there are so many dedicated cheaper products running lighter software to do that.
For most basic tasks, I haven't really had too much trouble with speed. Opening up Office, some web browsing and things of that nature were faster than I expected on this Atom machine I'm using. Updates and the like are slow, though that's more on the poky BiWin eMMC drive than the Atom cpu.

Gaming I have not yet attempted though, as I know full well that it would probably fall flat on it's face. At best, maybe L4D2 on low is in the cards, but doubtful. Maybe HL2? Besides, the heavy stuff is what Nala (the desktop) is for. :sneaky:
 
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ehume

Golden Member
Nov 6, 2009
1,511
73
91
My HP Stream handles PDF files and captive (non-Internet) html files just fine. Beyond that it's punch-drunk.

@Zodiark: I like your sig.
 

jihe

Senior member
Nov 6, 2009
747
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You'd think 10 year on intel could just make a low tdp c2d, atom is just trash.
 

Gunbuster

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
6,852
22
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You'd think 10 year on intel could just make a low tdp c2d, atom is just trash.

Pretty much the Core M7-6Y75 at 4.5 watt But instead of being $40 like the atom intel decided having the step up from suckass performance is $393.

Then they sit around wondering why their partners have trouble moving product. I can understand having product tiers but jesus make it cost $100 for the Core M...
 

IllogicalGlory

Senior member
Mar 8, 2013
934
346
136
It goes faster for web browsing, if you disable / remove Flash Player, and use a wired ethernet connection, as I discovered with my Brix J1900 unit.

I don't think it rises to the level of "pleasurable computing", even with an Intel SSD, but it's bearable. It doesn't make me crazy.
Weaker than a desktop, far less powerful than one you could get for the same price, tethered to a router, and can't use flash player. Great! ;)
 

rchunter

Senior member
Feb 26, 2015
933
72
91
I've got a DS1513+ nas that has an Atom D2700 in it. It's fine for what it is I guess. I mainly just stream audio off it (minimserver/bubbleupnp server) so it doesn't really need to be a high-end chip.