BSA Starfire wrote:I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB […]
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I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB SATA, 2 gig of DDR2. It's a nice little machine, but not in any way fast!! Probably mostly held back by the crappy Via Unichrome on board IGP. My Pentium 4 1.8A with only 1 gig and a geforce4mx leaves it in the dust.
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What it does do however is run cool and quiet using very little power, coretemp shows 52C for the cpu under sustained full load, but only 25c(just above ambient) on idle, that is with only the tiny CPU fan, no other cooling whatsoever.
I've never seen a nano system either, never mind a muli-core version, TBH I don't think they ever really made it here to the west.
In many ways the system is a anachronism, melding modern features like SATA and DDR2 memory, quad pumped bus etc onto what is pretty much a 1990's cpu. Interesting little machine really.
I knew the C7 was slow, but being blown away by a P4 @ 1.8 puts that in perspective. I had always read that the C7 was a sort of tweaked Centaur core from the VIA-Cyrix III days, so I guess it wouldn't scale that well and shouldn't be that surprising.
I like the idea of mixing old and new tech - mainly under the "because you can" file - so DDR2 and SATA on a late 90's variant core is pleasing. That's actually a nice little system. 😎
swaaye wrote:There must have been something about Nano that was uninteresting to OEMs that prevented it from coming in during the original Atom era. Either it wasn't quite up to what the spec sheet bragged about, or there were supply issues.
Once AMD brought out their Bobcat CPU, Nano's window of opportunity was gone.
That's what's so puzzling. The Nano seemed clearly superior to Atom (and probably remained so up until at least Cedar Trail) and it also supported x64 and (iirc) SSE4.
I have vague memories of a bunch of netbook announcements with Nano that never materialized, but they could be just fuzzy recollections as searches only really reveal references to those three note[net]books mentioned above, so maybe nothing else was ever planned.
Perhaps NVIDIA's Ion took some steam out of it? I remember that being one avenue of making Atom less painful vs the 945gm. The IdeaPad S12 had an Ion-Atom variant in addition to the Nano one.
nforce4max wrote:They have a decent performing quad core but everything around it is so dated that making it into a decent platform would be too costly. IPC it is up there with AMD and surprisingly close to Intel but behind fpu wise. At least it has better fpu performance than what amd has but the lack of a imc (integrated memory controller) and the fact it is a pair of dual cores on a mcm package.
Does the lack of an IMC really hurt it though vs a modern Atom? (I am aware Atom has improved significantly so maybe the answer is indeed yes). But I recall a lot of speculation about how Intel wouldn't be able to recover in the Athlon 64 days until it integrated an IMC - and they ended up squeaking another 5 years or so out of the FSB when Conroe came along.