[lug] Atom Based Computers

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 13:22 -0600, Stephen Queen wrote:

> 
> This strikes me as curious. I would think that a processor running at
> 1 GHz or better would compile fairly quickly. I figured that the atom
> was not as fast at the Pentium, but I didn't think it was a dog.  Any
> Idea why it compiles so slow?

I agree with Zan and Michael: It's not the Atom's slower Ghz clock that
makes it a slower chip, it's the overall combination of features.  One
of the most notable is its limited L2 cache.

A few months ago I benchmarked my Atom netbook running at 1.6Ghz with
DDR or DDR2 RAM against a six year old HP notebook with a 1.5Ghz
Pentium-M.  I'd assumed that since the netbook gave me such a pleasant
3-D enabled desktop experience and seemed otherwise snappy it would
outperform the notebook, but that wasn't the case.

In head to head tests of encoding wav files to mp3 format (an almost
purely CPU intensive task) the notebook came out 15-20% faster.

What the Atom shows is that you can use today's very small die size and
low power requirements to make a very satisfying experience, especially
when paired up with specialized chips to offload graphics, network, etc.
So it's good for netbooks, thin terminals, and specialized computing
devices but it's never going to compete with contemporary CPUs for raw
speed.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
========================================================================
        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
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