I have been looking around for a cheap windows 8 tablet/covertable device and of course the intel atom is in many of them. In my looking I occasionally see a pentuim Y part or a celeron U part and i'm wondering why those are still in products. In anandtech's benchmark, it shows it nearly keeping up with the ivy bridge i5 U part in 7-zip (in multi threaded applications of course.)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested/2
So I went to intel's website and found that these atom parts are going for between 30 and 40 $ for reasonably fast SKUs
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/70095/Intel-Atom-Processor-for-Smartphone-and-Tablet
So, the atom has a max TDP of 4.5 watts and the Pentium Y has a max TDP of 12.5 watts. I am struggling to see a reason to run with the pentium in this scenario. The same goes for the Celeron U part I've seen in some chrome books, there is usually not a performance hit to go with the atom, it's very inexpensive, and it is extremely power efficient.
Maybe i'm missing something really obvious, or maybe intel is not letting everyone get their hands on the atom to make sure their other CPUs still go somewhere.
And on another note, what if we had servers just using tons and tons of 30$ atom processors, I hear power draw is an issue in the huge server facilities, maybe 4 watt atoms would fix that problem.
If anyone has thoughts I would love to hear them
Nah the 30 scsi hdd's along with major cooling use more power than the cpu's, However 11 4.5 watt atom would make a decent impact.
Gotta say though, after trying one today for a 4.5w cpu they push a ton of power.
what device are you using the atom in, I was looking at getting the dell venue 11 pro on ebay for about 300 and a separate logitech keyboard to go with it
edit, was a 7.5 w baytrail quad core celeron in a lenovo thinkpad 11e
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2920.html
noob question.
are there many motherboards that can take these? seems like it would be ideal for HTPCs and home file/media/cloud servers.
yes, but they are already soldered to the motherboard. cannot be removed. costs about $60 for a dual $70 for a quad
i see. i recently picked up a board with a quad core celeron soldered on to it. used it as my home media/file server. they didn't have any atom based boards at my shop.
atom name was scrapped due to bad press. that celeron IS an atom.
I see. intel's naming scheme isn't very clear. i suppose obfuscation is the point.
it's supposed to have a TDP of 10w so that makes sense.
you can get boards with quad-core bay-trail atoms pre-soldered, they are well below $100 / 80€ (I'm not aware that you can get a socketed version, at least not in retail.)
But given the additional cost of a power-supply, case , ram & mass-storage, they aren't really cost competitive with tiny arm-soc-boards like the odroids etc.
i didn't know about odroids. they look very interesting as the RAM is soldered on so that's a $40 or so saving, not mention that they're tiny!
Would make a nice compact client for a home theatre PC or something. Might see if i can add support for HDMI-CEC for a remote. If i can it would be perfect for the living room.