Conclusion: Athlon 64 Is More Economical, Faster, And Quieter
In our Munich lab’s duel of the energy-savers, the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power. Each of the systems was based on a desktop platform. The Achilles heel of the Intel system is its old system platform with the 945GC chipset, while AMD offers a more modern 780G platform.
The energy-saving solution from AMD offers more possibilities: it has three times as many SATA ports, possesses better onboard graphics performance, and can also support two monitors. Unlike the Intel solution, an HD resolution (1920x1200) with high picture quality is possible through DVI/HDMI ports. And early information suggests that the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ should cost close to $90.
In terms of noise level, AMD can again beat the Intel solution: in our test the AMD energy-saving platform was able to run without a fan. Due to the high energy consumption of Intel’s chipset, the Atom board requires active cooling for stable and error-free operation.
Although the Athlon 64 2000+ uses more power than Intel’s Atom 230 CPU, the entire system requires less energy both when idle and during full load operation because of the chipset. AMD currently offers the most energy-saving desktop platform on the market, and requirements could be lowered even further if the manufacturer of a 780G board decided to use a single-phase controller with other energy-saving components.
The AMD platform has one disadvantage, however: at present, the 780G chip set is only available on a microATX board, where Intel offers a significantly smaller miniITX board. It would be sensible if AMD also offered very small embedded boards, which would enable the company to widen the gap even further.
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yay, good for amd..
now if they can get a tiny mobo out and sort out those other issues, they mght be able to make the lead even greater.
good for amd!
p.s. stuff and nonsense:
http://www.eupeople.net/forum
Nice article... But where are the CPU usage charts of HD and DVD playback on the Atom...??
There surely would a case for the MB BIOS to support a dynamic overclock just to pull the Athlon 2000+ into the bottom range for HD playback??
Bob
Because these processors aren't aimed at performance junkies. The big space right now is enterprise users looking for low power consumption for thin clients and data warehouses, where temperature and energy consumption are limiting factors over the speed at which bankers can play quake.
think netbooks (eeepc/acer one/msi wind)
Jetway has announced a mini-ITX format mobo using the 780G, its code NC81 LF - see http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboa [...] me=NC81-LF
this article is uber pwnage
think netbooks (eeepc/acer one/msi wind)
exactly !
Fit that desktop setup inside a netbook case then I will be impressed.
Ps. Not a comment against the Athlon, but come on apples to something in the fruit family would be good. I'm sure my Core2 would be very power efficient at ~600mhz.
Were is the power readings for the system taken from?? Before of after the PSU.
This needs to be used in a netbook.
Raon apparently have a 7" umpc/netbook using the old 690G chipset:
http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/08/ [...] 9-version/
i personally think they missed the boat because they should absolutely be using the 780G chipset.
MSI had a small board too so you could compared the 2 of them on the same board size: http://global.msi.eu/index.php?fun [...] cat_no=388
Intel deliberately cripples the capabilities of Atom motherboards to make sure Atom doesn't sabotage sales of Celeron CPUs. If I remember correctly, the following limits are imposed on Atom motherboard makers:
No PCIe graphics slot allowed
Only 1 Ram slot allowed
No more than 2 SATA Ports allowed
No Gigabit Lan allowed
Only 1 PCI slot allowed.
I own an Intel Atom board, which I use as a Network file server and bittorrent downloading machine. It draws about 40 watts.
Tell me please the secret, how are you guys doing so nice screenshots of the BIOS? That is definitely not a photo, nor an analog grab over some output, but I'm not aware of a way to grab such nice picture over digital-something (DVI, HDMI ... ?).
Well... J&W actually already have a miniITX motherboard with 780G Chipset, should be more comparable to the atom platform tested.
http://www.jwele.com/motherboard_detail.php?419
Dual monitors? Blu Ray? Vista?....who buys Atom or Athlon? There's three things that will drive this low power market, price, price and price. The ability to produce low cost, reasonable performance and small form factor desktop and mobile PC systems is where the game is, not how fast you can rip this or render that. Sadly, most poeple miss the point of this - you want performance, spend the money to get it, if you want a low cost PC that can do email and internet, and in netbooks case, give extraordinary battery life, be prepared to sacrifice performance to get a basic PC. Low cost and energy efficiency is the new mantra for new markets all over the world today.
I don't understand...
I can play DVD with a pentium II. How can CPU consumption went so high with an Athlon 64@1G?
Also, for bluray, in my Athlon X2 @2.5G it hardly passes 10%(with hardware acceleration of course.) multiply it by 5 should be an overestimate of the usage, yet it only gives you 50%...
Are you sure it's not an OS problem?
Thanks for the review. I'am have been playing with low power systems since 2003, build my own server based on Geode G1 and PC/104 system 300 MHz, running as web/email server for years with Suse linux and X server. It consumes 8W in power and was running 24/7 withou any problems. Imagine, that it can be done. No need for 4 cores 1000 GHz and 2000 GB RAM and noisy fan!
Recently I replaced it with 1 GHz VIA C7/ 1GB RAM, 10W, (lex neo system)which is running OpenSuse 10.3. It is not a high performance system, however it runs very smoothly.
Do you consider to compare this kind of low power system with the Atom and Athlon systems? I'am suprised, that the power consumption of the described systems is so high compared to their efficiency.
That 0.95W figure for the 780G power consumption is for Idle power, not TDP surely...?
But where can you buy these low power AMD chips?
I don't see anyone selling them.
I see lots of Atom boards with chips.
An interesting article but practically not very useful until someone starts shipping the chips
Great subsitute for thin clients because it's not dependent on a server. Could office work all day long on an Athlon 64 2000 rig with and 780G mobo. Great machine for anyone only doing office and internet.AMD please [/b]get an OEM to sell machines with a combination of very low power consumption like that.