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VIA Nano vs Intel Atom
| Author | Edward Chester |
| Published | 14th Aug 2008 |
Comments for VIA Nano vs Intel Atom
pimlicosound said on 15th August 2008
Kebab said on 15th August 2008
How are they not fair? The Atom and Nano are limited to their specific chipsets and this is a *platform test* not a CPU. If you want to find a PCI card to do video offloading - good luck. The test merely indicates that the integrated graphics can or cannot handle certain types of video when looked at on a mini-ITX platform level.
Ed says that the Atom is a netbook/nettop processor and the Nano is a bit beefier, but you can still buy mini-ITX Atom boards to use in desktop machines like the Gigabyte here. If you understand what's been tested it's to educate the readers where each product lies in the market and the Atom shouldn't be used outside of netbook, which was essentially Eds conclusion.
1GB of memory is more than adequate for a very basic system and home theatre PC, and not every mini-ITX board offers two DIMM slots.
Ed said on 15th August 2008
Essentially, as the article says, we've been pushing VIA for some Nano products for a while and what they came up with was a desktop board. Now you can argue the semantics of what you kit the rest of the test system out with until you're blue in the face but the simple fact of the matter is it was never going to be a direct comparison. This is just a quick look at the raw performance potential.
As for the video, these chipsets don't offset h.264 decoding, which is the real killer, and Xvid and MPEG2 they coped with fine - so what's the problem?
As for the RAM issue. Well, that was our one concession to making this reflect the netbook environment - most of them come with 1GB. Mostly, though, it simple doesn't affect performance for the sort of tasks we were doing.
Mr Real said on 7th November 2008
VIA Nano vs Intel ATOM. I've been reading those reviews for months now. And not without reason. I am ready to buy. I have been ready. But I decided to give VIA a chance and wait until it is finally available. I've been waiting for months. Every once in a while there is a new review or two. WHERE IS THE PRODUCT?! First the reviews were about NANO vs single core ATOM. Then Intel shipped the dual ATOM. Then I read some reviews about how Nano can still outrun the Dual ATOM in some tests. Granted, Nano will probably cost an arm and a leg as it always has, compared to Intel, but it has built-in crypto that Intel has neglected to put in, so Great, i'm ready to pay more and wait! I'm now wondering, will there be a quad Atom with better chipset before I could finally BUY a Nano? Will Atom be able to do enough AES in software by then so I could finally let go and get an Atom for a fifth of the price?
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The video playback tests hardly seemed fair, since they were using different graphics chipsets, which make up a large part of the performance in this area. Also, I believe VIA were using their new (VX800?) chipset in their video demonstrating 1080p playback.
Furthermore, as you admit in your closing paragraphs, you were essentially testing a netbook-level processor (Atom) against a standard laptop processor (Nano), and while every other tech site on the Net is doing this right now, it doesn't seem to be particularly relevant. Like you say, we have to wait till VIA releases one of their netbook-level chips for testing and comparison.
Finally, why on earth were you using an 850W PSU for the test setups!? The power consumption of these systems wouldn't even have entered the peak range of the PSU's efficiency curve. And who would partner such systems with a 150GB Raptor? While trying to run Vista on only 1GB RAM? It doesn't seem like a very realistic test setup.