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Saturday, January 30, 2010
Update: Atom D510 benchmarks from Anandtech.
So we’ve seen the new ASUS Eee PC 1005PE and there’s not much new apart from 20-25% improvement in battery life which is pretty nice. Now what about the nettop based Pine trail processors, the D410 and D510 ones?
Well, PCMag has got a white-box no name dual-core Atom D510 nettop from Intel to test out, and they ran some benchmarks comparing it to a dual-core Atom 330 processor in the Acer Aspire Revo R3160 and a single-core Atom 230 powered Lenovo IdeaCentre Q110 nettop. Turns out it’s similar story with the nettop based Pine View processors - lower power consumption but no real performance gains.
If you ignore the 3D graphics figure (since the Aspire Revo is powered by ION graphics) performance wise there are no substantial performance gains with the Atom N510 processor over the Atom 330 processor and nothing you’re really going to notice in real life. The main difference comes in power efficiency.
The added benefit of reduced power consumption is that it allowed the white box N510 nettop to run fanless, so zero noise. Noise has been a problem for at least a couple of current generation nettops. So it looks like the new Atom D510 gives dual-core processor performance with power consumption levels close to a single-core Atom 230 nettop, however with no HD playback support built-in, this isn’t what you’d call an upgrade over any nettop with ION graphics and the last I have heard is that the Pinetrail platform is not compatible with the current ION chipset.
| Idle | Load | CPU | Graphics | |
| Apple Mac Mini | 15W | 34W | Core 2 Duo | GeForce 9400M |
| Acer Aspire Revo R3610 | 0 | 26W | Atom 330 | NVidia ION |
| Atom D510 nettop | 0 | 19W | Atom D510 | GMA 3150 |
| Lenovo IdeaCentre Q110 | 0 | 19W | Atom 230 | NVidia ION |
| ViewSonic VOT120 | 0 | 16W | Atom 230 | GMA 950 |
Source: PC Mag
Just as pointless as the mobile Pine Trail. On the desktop, you’re not constrained by power anyway since you’re always plugged in and no HD decoding is stupid. Again, no use being super power efficient when you can’t do anything with your CPU, and Anandtech says the desktop Pine Trail is still sluggish.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3692&p=5
“On average, it’s still a sluggish platform. I’d take Pine Trail over the old Atom any day, but set your expectations accordingly: Atom can’t deliver the performance of a modern day machine, it’s best used as a secondary or tertiary PC.”