[geeks] Speaking of Atom and power usage..

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:20:31AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:

> 1.6GHz Atom 230 processor against AMD's Athlon 64 2000+, and the results
> just might surprise you. The 1GHz Athlon (with a core voltage of 0.90 volts
> and a power draw of just 8 watts) managed to best the aforementioned Atom
> in both energy consumption and processing power tests. The gurus at Tom's
> credited the more modern 790G platform and the highly efficient K8
> architecture as big players in the Athlon's strong showing, finally deeming
> said chip "more economical, faster and quieter" than the Atom. We know
> you're in disbelief -- good thing there are 14 pages of proof waiting in
> the read link."

Seriously, back when I thought I was really going to build a handheld device,
I had my hands on an AMD 1gHz Athalon chip before it was announced. It
outperformed the then current 1gHz PIII and 1.4gHz PIV chips and at full
bore put out 6 watts. You could run the thing with a passive heatsink
and not the big fans and chimneys needed for the Intel or Via "low power"
chips.

The brilliance of the Intel Core architecture (which is an Israeli invention)
is not that you can put multiple low performance laptop processors on the
same die and sell it like a "real cpu", it's convincing people that 2 2gHz
cores is as fast or faster than a 3gHz single desktop processor.

To be quite blunt, I don't think Intel ever made anything that runs 
normally at 4gHz, but most customers think that a 2x2gHz dual core chip
does. :-)

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM