Date:
Tuesday , July 29, 2008
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

Intel Atom vs.VIA Nano

A battle of the most powerful processors on the face of the Earth? Nope. Who sucks the least? Not really, but closer. Marketing teams will have you believe one thing, but we are here today to show HardOCP readers what they likely care about. Which one just works better, Atom or Nano?

continued...

Conclusions

Some of you may be surprised by the results, while others may not. I have to admit, I expected the VIA Nano to come out on top given its superscalar out of order architecture, but I did not expect the Intel Atom to take such an overall beating. The Nano looks like a power efficient version of the Pentium 4 while the Atom looks like a power efficient version of the VIA C7. Everything old is new again?

The Final Score

We usually don’t keep “score,” but it seemed of interest in this comparison.

Final Score: Intel Atom-2 / VIA Nano-10

The only two contests that were “won” by our Atom was the Full System Wattage test and our wPrime synthetic benchmark with dual threading enabled. Our system wattage contest pulled within 10 real-world watts while our wPrime test was decided by a 2 second difference. Hardly either are decisive wins for our Atom.

Asking Too Much of Atom

If you take the time to read Intel’s pages on the Atom, you will never see it designated to be put into “workhorse” applications like we have done today. We have not done anything special in our Atom testing, we have simply taken our normal set of motherboard/chipset/CPU tests and thrown them both at the Atom and the Nano.

"This is our smallest processor built with the world's smallest transistors. The Intel® Atom™ processor is based on an entirely new design, built for low power and designed specifically for a new wave of Mobile Internet Devices and simple, low-cost PC's. This small wonder is a fundamental new shift in design, small yet powerful enough to enable a big Internet experience on these new devices. We believe it will unleash new innovation across the industry."

As we mentioned on page one, the Atom and the Nano are two different animals, but I continually see them lumped into the same category when they simply should not be. Journalists covering Nano and Atom do this fairly often though. We think that many of the uses we are seeing Atom put into are simply asking a lot of it when in fact a Nano would be a better match. It is hard for us to think of Atom processors going into “real” notebooks, but they are.

These Atom-based notebooks will be available in the middle of this year for about US$250 to $300, said Navin Shenoy, general manager of Intel's Asia-Pacific operations, in an interview. "We'll see some slightly richer configurations that get up to $350," he said.

I have spent a good week or so using both the Atom and Nano in a Windows Vista 32-bit environment, and I can tell you now that I never want to be subjected to Atom on the desktop again. Maybe I have been spoiled by high-end processors from Intel over the last year, but Atom on the desktop is sluggish and cumbersome at best. I would hate to think of Atom without Hyperthreading, because Hyperthreading has got to be the one saving grace the Atom has when it comes to usability. On the other hand, the VIA Nano was not a speed demon either, but it allowed a tremendously more fluid and intuitive GUI experience than Atom did on the desktop. If you had to take the Pepsi Challenge, there is no doubt that a user would be able to tell a difference between the Nano and the Atom when it came to using it in Windows. The Atom was slower to react and simply took longer to accomplish simple desktop tasks.

Atom’s and Nano’s Direction?

If you dig a little deeper into Intel’s vision of what Atom is for, you will see that it is very much pushing Atom to be used in the Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) space.

If you are looking for an Internet experience in your pocket, look for a Mobile Internet Device powered by the revolutionary Intel® Centrino® Atom™ processor technology. With incredible mobile performance, wireless connectivity and long battery life, your new Mobile Internet Device will allow you to connect, entertain, stay informed, and be productive wherever you go.

I don’t see notebooks with 7” to 10” screens being tucked into too many pockets. But wait a minute! If you start looking into Intel’s promo videos here, you find very quickly that even though Intel’s pages never mention Atom and notebooks, its videos very much do.

Atom is not being widely utilized in what it was truly designed for, and that is UMPCs. I keep seeing Atom bandied around as “notebook processor.” I would very much like to get my hands on notebooks that we will be seeing soon, but from my limited desktop experience it is clear to me that VIA’s Nano is going to be a superior notebook processor. I never wanted a VIA C3/C7 notebook either and had more than a few chances to own those, so don’t think I am playing favorites here. That all said, HardOCP was looking at VIA Origami UMPCs well over two years ago. From what I have seen here, Atom is very much likely to be a better UMPC processor for simple reasons that rule the processor world. Atom will be very inexpensive, it uses a lot less power at the processor level, it is smaller, and Atom still has enough processing power to crunch through the things that UMPCs need to be doing. The UMPC has yet to carve out a real niche’ in the market however though, and it will be interesting to see if Atom can make that happen.

HD Disappointments

The VIA PR representative that told us about how great their products were, specifically said that Nano was capable of playing “Blu-ray.” So on the way home from the meeting, I stopped and picked up an LG Blu-ray player. To make a long story short, neither the Intel Atom system or the VIA Nano system we were using would play a Blu-ray disk using the version of PowerDVD provided with the LG Blu-ray player. The GPU solution on both systems was the issue.

I then went to Microsoft’s WMV HD Content Showcase and grabbed the 720p and 1080p versions of the Terminator 2: Judgment Day clip. Both the Nano and Atom systems would play the 720p video using the native media player but neither would acceptably play the 1080p version of the clip. Both dropped so many frames it simply was not watchable. Given that my 2.66GHz QX6700 utilizes a full core to play the 1080p clip, what we saw or rather didn’t see, was not surprising.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to a sheer performance comparison, the VIA Nano rules and the Intel Atom drools. The Nano is simply superior in so many ways when side-by-side with Intel Atom, but that is more from our “power geek” perspective. From our experiences here, the VIA Nano looks to be much better choice than the Intel Atom in the “mini-note” or notebook market. Conversely, the Intel Atom looks to be best equipped for what it was truly designed for and that is Mobile Internet Devices and Ultra Mobile PCs that are not Windows based. The Atom pulls much less power and is smaller in die size due to its forward-looking 45nm fabrication process and less transistors. The Nano we looked at here consumes up to 5X more power (25 watts TDP is spec) and is huge compared to Atom (63mm² vs. 25mm²). As you can see on the linked slide though, VIA has plans for Nano all the way down to 5 watt TDP power envelopes so it will be very interesting to see how Atom and Nano compare at lower speeds and wattages.

When I go to buy my next Ultra-Compact notebook, and I have carried Sony UCs since 1998, I will surely give some of the VIA Nano solutions a look. I could likely purchase 3 VIA Nano notebooks for what one Sony costs me now with a single core Intel processors at a whopping 1.3GHz. On the other hand the Intel Atom has exhibited that it has more than enough performance to do whatever tasks most UMPCs or Mobile Internet Devices will need. I am just not sure I need a UMPC when I already have a Blackberry and an Ultra-Compact notebook.

Please Digg to Share!

Discussion

Please join us in the HardForum for our Atom Vs. Nano discussion.