slow intel Atom: stay away!
I saw my first intel atom computer the other day.
And it wasn’t a laptop. It was an Acer e-Machine EL1600
At first glance, Its seemed nice: 4 front USB ports, 4 rear USB ports, a DVD-RW, a small case, XP, a small monitor was also included.
At first, I didn’t even check the CPU… I just assumed it was a celeron, a low-end pentium, or a core2 duo.
I installed it and fired it up, I went through the install process, setup the internet connection, and then installed anti-virus, etc.
But as I was configuring it, something wasn’t right.
It felt slow… sluggish.
I thought: thats unusual for a new PC running XP. It should be faster than this. I’ve got 6 year old PCs that feel faster than this.
When I saw it was an Atom CPU, then the penny dropped: I had heard that Atoms were slower than celerons, but I didn’t expect then to be this slow.
According to some people, a 1.6Ghz Atom performs like a 800Mhz celeron. Well, it certainly feels like a sub-1Ghz computer.
Some people might think its worth it for the price… But in this case: I disagree. Pay a bit extra, and you will get something (non-Atom) that is substantially, and noticeably faster.
Weird; I onw a netbook (msi wind) with an atom processor… I was happily surprised with the speed of that one…. On the other hand; I also didnt expect a lot speed…. But I am sure it is not the speed of a 800mhz celeron !
Yeah, I think Acer screwed up here.
The target application for the Atom CPU is laptops where the user cares more about battery life than performance.
I’ve read spec on some laptops with the Atom, and run times are up around 12-14 hours.
There’s no practical use for this chip on a desktop, unless you want to save a dollar or two on your monthly electric bill.
They are even being OEM’d into the server market. Have a read of what Super Micro are doing with them in a 1U
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7206125225.html
I agree Pedro.
Except the desktop is more likely to save you a dollar or two over a whole year.
Although what Todd says about servers sounds interesting… Imagine cramming 10 or 20 “atoms” into 1U rack space.
I don’t know a whole lot about computers but I was looking at an Acer and I know of some who have them and they are doing okay. I’m glad I read this post about the Atom because I do not need slower. Thanks!
Friends 4 Life!
A (somewhat) misleading article that never gets into any details – YES, the Atom will perform much slower than traditional processors, but you’re also asking it to compete on the same playing field. That’s like saying your local high school football team can’t compete with the Pittsburgh Steelers or the New England Patriots. Of course they can’t – for one, they’re high school kids, and for two – they’re not professionals getting paid millions of dollars!
The Atom was a processor designed for very specialized use (just as Pedro said above), battery life. It is able to run all of the same applications and programs your regular 800MHz Celeron can, but at a FRACTION of the power footprint. The input-to-output ratio here is quite impressive.
The problem is that since these machines are so impressive at this, they’re small and they’re also cheap, so it entices “normal” buyers into getting them. Another problem is that computer manufacturers’ marketers have lead us to believe that clock speed alone is a level metric to compare two computers. There are so many other things, such as cache, instruction set, power consumption, so on and so forth, that most people aren’t even aware of to compare. Shame on the manufacturers to somewhat misleading people here, but also shame on the consumers for not being better educated (caveat emptor!).
Another problem is that for one of these machines to run as spec’d, people have to run them as they’re supposed to. I’ve seen far too many people over-use even regular desktops, I can’t wait until people start bringing me their netbooks to “make it go faster” because they don’t understand that they can’t have 20 APPLICATIONS STARTING ALL AT THE SAME TIME!
Agree with matgab atom are shit even they reach 2ghz they can be slow yes consumer should always look for clock speed cache instruction set watts if they want a pc with better performance. even opening a folder takes time even on multiple browsing even if they are slow as hell i dont think they are .the only thing they are slow b’coz of low watts from what i expierence my amd athlon 2 1.5ghz performs much better than atom people should go for a notebook rather than netbook they cant even finish a simple task and takes time