Thursday, December 17, 2009
I noticed a bunch of slides from ARM today at some event here in Japan and this one promo slide comparing the 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor (to be seen in smartbooks) to the Atom processor (1.6GHz). They could just as easily be biased!
The Cortex-A9 slightly outperforms the Atom processor for web browsing. (bias perhaps). I heard something previously about web browsing being hardware accelerated at Computex 2009 earlier this year, but I don’t know what has become of that development.
Obviously the original Atom isn’t much of a match in terms of power consumption / size and I would like to see how the next-gen Atom processors fare.
Source: PC Watch
Pineview, the so called “next-gen” Atom is still fabbed on 45nm process, still has no real architechture improvements over the older Atom 230/N2x0 except for integrated memory controller which means slightly higher performance and lower latency memory access. The GMA 3150 IGP is crap of course and doesn’t even have the HD video decoders like the GMA 4500MHD IGP in the CULV notebooks, some which you have reviewed, Peter.
You won’t even see any real improvements until the 32nm Atom but then again Intel will get beaten in performance with AMD’s out-of-order execution Bobcat CPU which will certainly be faster than the in-order Atom unless the real next-gen 32nm Atom is also going out-of-order execution in response to Bobcat, which is unlikely.
The Z-series Atom processors would be a more equal comparison. Those are Intel’s lowest power chips and chipsets, plus the Z-series chipsets also support HD Video acceleration up to 1080P. I’m not saying that the Z-series would win, but it wouldn’t be such a lopsided comparison in terms of power usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom#Atom_Z_series
On March 2, 2008, Intel announced a new single-core processor (code-named Silverthorne) to be used in ultra-mobile PCs/Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) which will supersede Intel A100. The processor is a 47 million transistor, 25 mm2, sub-3 W IA processor which allows ~2500 chips to fit on a single 300 mm diameter wafer, allowing for extremely economical production.
An Atom Z500 processor’s dual-thread performance is equivalent to its predecessor Intel A110, but should outperform it on applications that can leverage simultaneous multithreading and SSE3.[16] They run from 0.8 to 2.0 GHz and have between 0.65 and 2.4 W TDP rating respectively that can dip down to 0.01 W[17] when idle. It features a 2-issue simultaneous multithreading, 16 stage in-order pipeline with 32 KB instruction L1 and 24 KB data L1 caches, integer and floating point execution units, x86 front end, a 512 KB L2 cache and data transferred at 533 MHz on the front-side bus. The design is manufactured in 9M 45 nm high-k metal-gate CMOS and housed in a 441-ball µFCBGA package