[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Anyone here own one of these tiny computers or used one? I'm thinking about getting one to replace by ancient PC.

[djellison]

Actually the Eee PC's are on about the same performance as that celeron. They're rolling out new Eee's with the Intel Atom chip in them, but I don't know how powerfull that is.


Doug

[helvick]

The Atom is unlikely to win many awards for raw cpu power - but it's not meant to. The initial processor speeds will range from 800Mhz to 1.8Ghz but its design motivation was to maximise processing power per watt and per dollar by keeping the cpu fairly simple so that the cpu die size is small enough to yield >2000 die per 300mm wafer and maximum cpu power draw under load would remain under 3 to 4 watts. Given that Intel's cost per wafer for 45nm on 300mm wafers is likely to start somewhere around $4-5k and drop towards $1500 per wafer over the prime lifetime of the process these things are intended to be able to go into very,very cheap devices while remaining very profitable for Intel. The assumption was that a CPU that is possibly 60-70% as powerful as a similarly clocked single core Centrino\Core CPU but that draws <10% of the power would be very tempting for manufacturers building whole new classes of highly portable networked devices (What Intel refers to as MIDs - Mobile Internet Devices, iPhone type devices one assumes) and "connected appliances" (I never did really figure out what they were).

The Eee and the Mac Mini would be right up at the limit of the market that Intel had originally intended selling the Atom into and there's a good chance that its lack of speed will upset some people. The plus side is that the Atom range should eventually enable manufacturers to deliver x86 platforms running PC like operating systems that can deliver performance comparable to 1-2Ghz machines of today with overall system peak power draws below 10 Watts (compared to the 30-60Watts today for thin and light laptops like the MacBook Air/Lenovo X300/Dell XPS M1330) so that realistic battery life might actally be measurable in days of use rather than hours.