Athlon vs. Atom

Apparently AMD was just too **** lazy to counter Intel's Atom design with an original one of their own, so they just lowered the voltage and clock speed of their old K8 architecture... the result is quite surprising, and for me it is a pleasant surprise, given AMD's troubles in the mobile CPU market.

Head to head comparison here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Atom-Athlon-Efficient,review-31253.html

Thoughts?

 

Well the point was that this isn't a mobile comparison. It's a desktop comparison and Intel foolishly or not, cripples Atom's desktop implementation by using a desktop variant of the 945G. Even if they didn't use the same chipset as the mobile implementations of Atom, which I believe is a small package version of the mobile 945GM with extra power optimizations, they could have still used a regular mobile 945GM chipset for the desktop implementations. With such a mature chipset, the costs couldn't have been much more, and would have better controlled the system power consumption. Afterall, Intel even went so far as to allow desktop usage of the mobile 945GM chipset as part of the Napa platform when the Yonah Core Duo was released in order to provide a lower power alternative to Netburst before the Core 2 Duo was released. So the concept had been done before.

In terms of the K8's low power usage, that's kind of expected given the maturity of both the architecture and the process. Atom's still in it's first stepping, so it'll probably see even better characteristics even at 45nm with the next stepping. But, really the 780G chipset is just amazing for the performance that it packs and it's power consumption. I guess buying ATI may have been a pretty good idea afterall.

EDIT: For comparison, the 945GC used for desktop Atom applications has a 22.2W TDP according to Tom's, and is basically a standard desktop chipset previously used with low-end Core 2 Duos and is basically a slightly crippled 945G. From Intel's spec sheets, a 945GT, which is basically an overclocked mobile 945GM that Intel used for desktop Core Duo applications has a 15W TDP. A standard 945GM has a 12W TDP. And the 945GSE used for notebook Atom applications has a 5.5-6W TDP. With the 780G having a 11.4W TDP, if Intel had used their existing 945GT mobile on desktop chipset it would have made a big difference in balancing out the system power usage.

 

interesting...interesting...