Depends really what atom architecture. Some of those don't have out-of-order execution and very poor branch prediction, both of which p4 was probably a lot better at.

Yeah, Atom sucks. But it is probably similar to a P3 1000 or so. Try Vista on a P3 sometime! Also if an app utilizes multiple threads, Atom's Hyperthreading can help a lot with eeking more out of the core.

Note though that we are on the cusp of a release of a new Atom microarchitecture that is a massive improvement over the classic one.

My strangely sluggish experiences were Athlon on VIA boards. I had a 2000+ on a KT880 and it was so dogged. It was bizarre. Put that CPU on a nForce2 and it is a much better experience.

snorg wrote:

... The atom is roughly equivalent to a P4 system, I don't ever remember properly kitted out P4 or even P3 systems feeling that slow ...

Har har 🤣 :

Ok, so it is closer to a PIII in performance. Still, I don't remember a 900 or 1ghz PIII feeling that slow. Maybe the interface to the RAM is using a narrower bus? That, coupled with a really slow 5400 rpm HD on SATA I could account for why it seems so gimpy.

Atoms were never made to be speed monsters. Atoms were made to be cheap and consume 6-7W of power. And the are based on the pIII architecture btw (at least the first ones)
Atom netbooks behave just fine with XP and simple surfing/email/document tasks. That's what they were made for in reality.

The magic of the atom is that you can build a file server|torrent|security|register|atm|etc 24/7 complete system that consumes 20-25W of power under full load.
Not make a machine to browse the internet or play games.

I've been using mITX systems for specific tasks since the embedded celeron era , they are wonderful. Just because companies decide to use them in crappy misleading netbooks or couple them with TERRIBLE chipsets (like the 945GC that is both way hotter and way power hungry than the atoms of the day) doesn't mean that the cpu in question is "bad". The nVidia ION chipset is a shiny example of what a good chipset can do to a cpu. I currently own an older atom330+ION mITX machine, no problems playing 1080p media or surf the internet or running win7/x64. (ofcourse it doesn't compare to a c2d for example but that doesn't mean that you will curse every 5secs when using it...)

keropi wrote:

Atoms were never made to be speed monsters. Atoms were made to be cheap and consume 6-7W of power.
Atom netbooks behave just fine with XP and simple surfing/email/document tasks. That's what they were made for.

I'm using this motherboard:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AT5IONTI/

It makes for a perfect HTPC 😀

Half-Saint wrote:

I'm using this motherboard: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AT5IONTI/ […]
Show full quote

keropi wrote:

Atoms were never made to be speed monsters. Atoms were made to be cheap and consume 6-7W of power.
Atom netbooks behave just fine with XP and simple surfing/email/document tasks. That's what they were made for.

I'm using this motherboard:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AT5IONTI/

It makes for a perfect HTPC 😀

I actually have the previous model with the atom330 + ION with shared memory under my tv 🤣 🤣 🤣

snorg wrote:

Ok, so it is closer to a PIII in performance. Still, I don't remember a 900 or 1ghz PIII feeling that slow. Maybe the interface to the RAM is using a narrower bus? That, coupled with a really slow 5400 rpm HD on SATA I could account for why it seems so gimpy.

If it is similar in speed to a PIII 800-900 then it's not gonna run XP well and NT6 will be unbearable. No magic mystery here. The HDD may not even be a bottleneck cuz a modern 5400RPM drive is wicked fast compared to one from 10 years ago.

Atom has much more memory bandwidth than a P3 but the core is just very simplistic. The IGP benefits from the memory bandwidth though.

The Atom you benchmarked is a relatively new model. I have a netbook with an Atom N270 and it is absolutely, utterly, horribly slow. I'll do benchmarks as soon as it recharges.

Atom is basically a super-high clocked 486, AFAIK, it does not only do out of order execution badly, it does not do it at all!

I think the bad chipsets and Service pack 3 have more to do with it through. SP3 is horribly slow. I had Windows XP I think SP1 or 2 on a Celeron 1 Ghz and 320 MB RAM and it wasn't slow at all. My friend upgraded to a modern 4 core system 2 weeks ago, but he had a 1.3 Ghz Athlon before that and newly installed XP even with SP3 run perfectly, despite a half-burned out Radeon 7000 as the graphics card.

m1so wrote:

The Atom you benchmarked is a relatively new model. I have a netbook with an Atom N270 and it is absolutely, utterly, horribly slow.

N450 is pretty much the same thing tho. The northbridge is integrated with the CPU but it is all the same tech essentially. It even still uses a FSB instead of a more direct memory controller. The main benefit was a big reduction in power consumption since the 915 chipset was a real hog (relatively speaking).

Brazos was almost just as gimpy as Atom, even though it does have out-of-order execution. But it lacks HTT and that made the difference for threaded applications, Atom was competitive there. Frankly the GPU is better on AMD but I don't think any netbook processor is worth it for gaming. Even something old like UT2004 is worthless on E-350. I think those AMD APUs received a bit more applause than they really deserved when compared to general Atom hate.

It doesn't help that they actually had the cheekiness of putting them into 15" notebooks which I doubt ever was the case for Atom. With Intel they usually stick to Celerons or whatever that perform a lot better at office tasks for the same price.

The fact I didn't reinstall it in 4 years probably doesn't help either 🤣 . That, and don't Atom devices power down the CPU a bit when running on battery power?

The AMD C series however absolutely beat Atom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7lerjK-P64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF9upCH5ATg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTf1oYM78yM . Hell, most "Pentium" (the new one not the P5 one) notebooks run games way worse than this. And that is at just 1 Ghz!

OK, those games run quite decently. Maybe UT2k4 is a special case with its CPU limitation. 😀

Whether a budget non-Atom Intel CPU wins in gaming or not depends on cooling. CPUs can't really burn out like back in the day so they often skimp on that. But something like a mobile i3 with a two times better iGPU than Pentium running at ~350 MHz (instead of the maximum 1100) will still win largely compared to a non-throttled E-350.

LinX results for my 2009 Compaq Mini netbook, behold the "awesome" performance 🤣 .

Yeah, really. That benchmark run 12 minutes and 11 seconds, so the N270 is really a dog after all. That would place it somewhere close to ... a 600 Mhz Pentium III with integrated graphics. That is something made in 2009. The Atom is no Pentium 4 folks, the Pentium 4 3 Ghz Northwood that formerly belonged to me and now is used as an office PC runs circles around it. The Atom is just a piece of shit, that's what it is.

And this is on mainline power, not battery.

I wonder, how does an Intel Atom or AMD C-350 compare to a Pentium M? Obviously the AMD and the Atom have multithreading support, but from the sounds of it they're less powerful in every other way. 😜

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I wonder, how does an Intel Atom or AMD C-350 compare to a Pentium M? Obviously the AMD and the Atom have multithreading support, but from the sounds of it they're less powerful in every other way. 😜

Atom? About 1/2 as powerful per clock as Pentium M http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom#Performance .

So what I don't get, is why didn't they just create a multicore version of the Pentium M architecture, and maybe implement it on a smaller process? Surely that would have been a much better mobile architecture than the Atom.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

So what I don't get, is why didn't they just create a multicore version of the Pentium M architecture, and maybe implement it on a smaller process? Surely that would have been a much better mobile architecture than the Atom.

Core Duo is just that (and it was on a smaller process with 65nm).

Atom is really intended for another class of low power, such as phone applications. The intial Atom chips were still too power consuming though. The 32nm Atom and the new 22nm one are going into phones though.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

So what I don't get, is why didn't they just create a multicore version of the Pentium M architecture, and maybe implement it on a smaller process? Surely that would have been a much better mobile architecture than the Atom.

Because they wanted to create something shittier relatively to mainstream than Covington Celeron 🤣 .

Just to put these "awesome" results to perspective, my i7 875k rig runs this test in just 13 seconds.

Yeah, my netbook that is just 1 year older is about 50x slower than my rig. This is what I am talking about when I rage about how modern budget/mobile computing is less "affordable power" and more "shittier than you can imagine in your worst nightmares". Compared to this, a Covington Celeron or the lowest AMD K6 was an awesome processor. Using overclocking, you could bring Celeron A Mendocino at 300 Mhz to 450 Mhz and challenge the most powerful Pentium 2 systems of the time. For my Atom in my netbook to reach my i7 in power, it would have to be clocked at 145 Ghz, I am not fucking kidding.