[geeks] New Intel Atom-based barebones system

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 02:59:08PM +0100, Mark wrote:
 
> I want a more optimal balance of power and efficiency than the  
> Core2Duo. While efficient they are not as good as a Dual Core Atom is  
> likely to be, they are just faster, too fast, they have too much CPU  
> power, if that could ever happen. Also as you so aptly pointed out the  
> board is very expensive and still has no CPU. Atom boards are cheap  
> and still useful. Imagine the same cheap board with 2x the CPU power  
> and barely 1.5x the power consumption, *that's* what I want :)

How could there ever be such a thing as too much CPU power?  Too much
power consumption?  Sure.  But to much CPU power?  How could that
possibly be.

> I have a specific requirement for the board, namely as a DVR and Media  
> player. A kind soul on here tested some 1080p and 720p H.264 video  
> files on his Atom board for me a while back and, while it just coped  
> with 1080p, it was stressing the CPU to hell and back, and would have  
> rendered anything else running at the time (including the GUI I'd bet)  
> unusable IMHO.
 
> HT is a bit of a swizz, it's just a way of dividing one CPU up into 2  
> performance units, there's no tangible gain from it for a heavy-weight  
> media task like mine. 

Even heavy weight media tasks have CPU stalls because of cache misses.
In theory, well written software would use hyper threading to take
advantage of running something else non-intrusively during the stall
time.  Reality may not work out this way though.

> Eggs-achery. It's just the current CPU included is a little on the  
> anaemic side for the application I want it for.

That may very well be.