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  • eanazag - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    As far as this is concerned to me, waste of time. If the video card was worth talking about Intel would be talking about it. This is just a release to clean up their offerings' shortcummings, not an attempt to take back dominance in this market. Battery life needs to jump an hour to make this interesting.
  • AmdInside - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    I agree. When it comes to CPU performance, Intel is pretty open given that they are generally much faster than AMD. When it comes to areas where they aren't good (larrabee), they are hush hush. When it came to Sandy Bridge graphics performance, they weren't as shy.
  • Hector2 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    I doubt Intel is going after the best gaming experience in their lowest cost, lowest power platform. That's for more expensive platforms and market segments. Using 32nm technology, it's starting to get pretty interesting as Intel integrates more & more into single chips which not only offer smaller footprints and increased performance, but lower power as well. It gets really interesting when Intel releases the 22nm version later and the 14nm later still. The new processes coming down the pipeline are real game changers for this market segment.
  • p3ngwin1 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    GPU's are not just for gaming anymore.

    with the advent of GPGPU's and hardware acceleration for everything from browsers, email clients, operating system functions like desktop composition to office applications like Microsoft Office 2010.

    competent GPU acceleration is becoming increasingly as important to basic and everyday productivity as having a competent CPU.
  • mados123 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    Exactly.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    Nobody wants the best gaming experience. People want a reliable graphics interface with proper drivers and good GPU-Computing power. All of that Intel is not able to deliver, unless they allow Nvidia to implement their chips properly. But I think Nvidia gave up on the Atom platforms after the NM10 shit anyway. You dont hear a word about ION3.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link

    Without a process shrink, or a new chipset with more PCIe links there's no point for a new ION.
  • Rafterman - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    Nonsense, you only need to look at the hardware forums on the net esp the Video sections to see a lot of users still want the most powerfull video cards money can buy, and not just one but 3(Sli). This is all about pure graphical power 95% of which is aimed at gaming.
  • DesktopMan - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    You mentioned that Brazos uses 18w while the new atom uses 10w (from the table), but how much do the platforms in total use? Intel doesn't have a particularly stellar record on the chipset side.
  • MonkeyPaw - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Yeah, and AMD hasn't done a speedgrade bump for brazos yet. I would have to think that by now, the chip is at least capable of 1.8ghz.
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Like I mentioned in the article, these new Atoms will continue to use Intel NM10 chipset which has TDP of 2.1W. AMD Brazos uses Hudson M1 chipset which has TDP of 4W.

    In total, Cedar Trail platform should have TDP of 12.1W while Brazos based system with E-350 should have a total TDP of 22W. That makes Atom 45% more efficient. Of course, these figures only include the CPU/GPU and PCH/FCH combos.
  • sbrown23 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    22W TDP vs 12.1W TDP does not make Atom 45% more efficient, since those are not real power numbers. We'll have to see what the actual numbers are when tests are performed with CPUs in the lab. Granted, TDP might be all we have on the upcoming Atom for now, but TDP != power use, and the actual difference could be higher or lower.
  • Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Efficient was probably a wrong choice of word but on paper, Atom's TDP looks better. Like I mentioned in the article, E-350 turned out to use less power, even under heavy load where the power consumption should be close to the actual TDP.
  • DanNeely - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    The real world difference appears lower. Anadtech tested an 11.6" E350 laptop a few months ago, it got ~9hours runtime vs ~11 for the best atom based system. That's much closer than the TDP numbers would indicate; probably because the E350 was able to spent more time at idle than the atoms were.
  • Icaros - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Back when second-generation atom got on-chip memory controllers the gains were quite disappointing since it turned out that it still had to go via. the FSB as far as I remember.

    Will this be solved now with the new chip? - and will the controller be on die as with the GFX? If that is the case won't that lead to some performance gains?
  • duploxxx - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    it is good that Intel is adding all the features for the IGP that will make atom finally able to handle HTPC but it is mutch to late and will be totally raped by the brazos refresh on both cpu and gpu performance which will be positioned at the same timeframe..

    http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Tapes-Out-the-2...
  • psychobriggsy - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    So almost a year after AMD released the E-350, Intel finally gets around to releasing a chip that might possibly be competitive - although likely not in graphics, and with the Intel graphics driver quality issue still outstanding.

    In addition the platform is going to be crippled by a low quantity of RAM, etc, just to try and keep the prices low. RAM is cheap, and the E-350 systems come with copious amounts.

    Later this year AMD will be releasing a few more Brazos chips with turbo functionality, and probably in Q1 next year (only a quarter behind Intel) they'll probably have their 28nm variants, including a quad-core as well as dual-cores, and enhanced Bobcat cores too.
  • Testers - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    AMD still sux and ever will. Period! E-350 systems sux at battery life
  • silverblue - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    No they don't, and no they don't.
  • Beaver M. - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    I dont care for battery life as much as I care for compatibility and reliability. AMD was always bad at those.
    So I just hope that AMD will start getting close to Intel in at least some aspects so that Intel finally lets Nvidia do their graphics stuff again.
  • Guspaz - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    These things have pretty similar performance and power usage to the first Atom chips released *three years* ago. High clocked dual core Cortex A9 chips are already more performant than Atom chips, and at significantly lower power levels to boot. If this is the best Intel can do after three years, ARM is going to swallow the Atom's entire marketshare in one gulp.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    So why is it that I can find half a dozen atom netbooks on sale for under $180, but I cannot find a brazos netbook for under $280, even though the brazos chip is $10 cheaper? Where is that extra $110 going? We are talking about more than 50% of the cost of the entire netbook here, and nobody is talking about this?
  • sbrown23 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Supply vs demand, vendors knowing they can get more because of higher performance?

    More memory shipped with the Brazos units (2GB vs 1GB)?

    Higher Atom volumes, thus lower production costs per unit?

    Brazos on more 11.6" screens vs 10" Atom netbooks?

    I'd imagine some bit of each of those plays into it.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Memory is only $8 more for 2GB, vs 1GB. Probably only $5 difference at the OEM level. The only thing that makes sense to me is sheer volume of intel builds. They order 5 million atoms and 5 million chipsets and they can afford to sell each netbook for only $20 markeup, especially if the first 200,000 units sell for $50 markup. But when they do an AMD build they only order 100k chips and 100k chipsets, so the volume just isnt there. This is why it never even mattered that AMD once upon a time had a chip that was 50% faster, dollar per dollar. In order to change things they would need a chip that is 100% faster, dollar for dollar. Imagine a i-5-2500k and 7 GHz. That is about what it would take for AMD to change things. And they'd have to sustain that sort of performance edge for many years.
  • StormyParis - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    Please do show me where I can buy that $8, not only brand-name but OEM-name, GB of RAM.

    Looking around, I indeed could only see 10", 1GB Atom netbooks at my usual web store, vs 11.6", 2GB Brazos ones. I havent checked for other differences, there may be some, including "qualitative" ones due to more recent release.

    In my personal case, I'm not looking for a netbook but a DIY nettop and a NAS server, and I'll be glad to shell out 150 euros for Asus's Brazos mini-ITX board, instead of a $60-$80 Atom one: EFI instead of BIOS, SATA3, USB3, 5 SATA ports, HDMI 1.3b. There are Brazos boards with essentially the same specs starting at 90 euros. Asus has some nice integrated extras though: fully passive cooling, WIFI N, Bluetooth, regular DIMM RAM.

    Apart from the slightly superior CPU, clearly superior GPU, and even more clearly superior platform, my guess is AMD is still a bit capacity-constrained, hence the prices, and the fact that mostly premium brands/products are featuring Brazos right now.
  • DanNeely - Sunday, May 1, 2011 - link

    Newegg has 1gb Kingston DDR3-1333 sodimms for $13, and 2gb sodimms for $20 (team brand) or $23 (gskill). $10 for brandname, vs $7 for generic is close enough to cover randomish price fluctuations..
  • Arbie - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    I can understand grading or binning parts by attainable clock speed, and I can understand product differentiation in the desktop market where the merits of the cpu are often independently considered.

    But where the chips are destined for laptops and especially for netbooks, I doubt that the same rules hold. If I'm shopping for a netbook there are many more considerations than the exact model of the cpu. Does anyone buying these things say "Maybe I'll save $9.50 and do without the double threading, but I do want the extra cache", or whatever? In this market it's much more of a whole-package deal.

    So, I think Intel and the other makers, and the system builders, and all consumers, would benefit if the mobile chip model lines were differentiated only by true binning parameters. Purposely disabling features to create another flavor is just silly. When these products actually get to market, nobody is paying attention, but a lot of people will get less than they could have at the same price. And they'll probably remember nothing more than the brand: "That laptop had an Intel chip and was really slow".
  • bji - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    I have tested these two processors quite extensively doing benchmarking for a MAME cabinet build. The Brazos is in the neighborhood of 60% faster in single threaded workloads than the Atom 330 that I tested (which is at most 10% slower than the newer Atoms). When multi-threaded workloads come into play, the advantage of Brazos dips to about 25%. I was surprised that hyperthreading is as effective as it is, it's obviously not like having 2 extra cores but in heavily multithreaded coded it does give a noticeable speed improvement.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    So MAME is about 60% faster on E-350 than an Atom 330. Now factor in the 10% improvement you mention, and E-350 is only about 45% faster (e.g. 100 vs. 160 becomes 110 vs. 160). Now consider that your Atom 330 runs at 1.60GHz, but the new Atom D2700 will run at 2.13GHz. That's another 33% improvement from clock speed, so in theory the comparison would become 146 vs. 160, which works out to E-350 being 10% faster. But things don't scale linearly with clock speed, so saying "about 25% faster" is going to be pretty accurate, and often it will be less than that.

    But of course, D2700 probably won't be competing directly against E-350 come December.
  • bji - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Sorry I misread the article and thought it was making a comparison between current Atoms and current Brazos. I agree with your conclusions based on performance estimates for next generation Atoms. Thank you for the correction.
  • pelov - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    so intel is finally making a netbook/HTPC chip that can play back HD video and bitstream? You'd think they'd have focused on that stuff before trying to enter that market.

    When factoring in GPU performance as well it's still hard to justify going the atom route. Battery life i'm sure will be fantastic with the new cedar trail chips, but it's still too much for phones and tablets. On the other side, we've clearly seen the CPU bottlenecking the e-350 and we won't see smaller nm chips for a bit. Green or blue? who knows.

    It's just hard to read the mobile market right now. Part of me feels x86 is too big and the other part feels ARM stuff doesn't have enough horsepower. It's just too confusing and fast-moving to try to speculate.
  • Andrew Rockefeller - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link

    Agreed. If you factor in the push toward touch interfaces, the GPU becomes even more important. Fast smooth screen behaviors which follow your fingers far outweighs the need for these devices to encode an MP3s at high speeds.

    It's all about user experience in the low end.
  • StormyParis - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    There's a push towards touch interfaces ? in the x86 segment ?
    Apart from the extremely rare x86 tablet (and nobody wants those) and the even rarer touch all-in-one (who wants to smudge their screen when they have a keyboard+mouse), I don't see what you're talking about. Kiosks ?
  • coolio68 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    Regarding the GPU Kristian, you may want to
    consider the Power VR SGX 545:
    http://www.imgtec.com/news/Release/index.asp?NewsI...
    Intel were lead partner.
  • 789427 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    I think AMD hit on something with their multi-task review highlighting the E-350.
    It showed complex excel calculations with video playing and other stuff cycling.
    Honestly, a low power user doesn't really care how fast the netbook encodes video - he cares about having his work open, watching a video without stutter when an email comes through and the ability to switch rapidly between the two.
    Real-world tests aren't super-pi calculations, rapid archive extraction etc.
    Benchmarks need to evolve for desktops too. tried encoding video and working at the same time?

    I urge Anand to make a push for a "Stuff that matters that we can test" benchmark such as heavy load switching, combined load experiences.

    e.g. my Phenom II 965 handles mass effect 2 but battles to switch to browser in-game to look up a game FAQ. giving it a 5/10 experience for this while the atlhon X2 performs a measly 2/10
    cb
  • maroon1 - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link

    Arrandale GPU doesn't support DX10.1, it is DX10 GPU. So, in other words we can certainly say that Cedar Trail GPU won't use Arrandale GPU

    However, it possible that it will be based on Sandy bridge GPU which supports DX10.1
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