Why you should wait for the Atom Eee PC
Nathan Taylor says it might be worth waiting for the next incarnation of the Eee, if the mightily impressive power rating and battery potential of Intel's new Atom chips is anything to go by.
It was exciting to hear this week about the coming Atom-based Eee PC 900. If you’ve ever played with an Eee, you’ve probably had the Eee epiphany (the Eeepiphany?). Years of futzing around with technology has made me pretty jaded about technology, but the Eee is actually really cool – especially the Linux version. (As an aside, I have no idea why Asus has recently been so keen to push the Windows XP version, apart from an obvious sweetheart deal from Microsoft, when the Linux version is better in every way imaginable).
I’ve been holding off on buying an Eee, though, because I knew the Atom version was coming. Intel’s Atom is one of the few new processors that have held much interest for me in recent times, because it’s specifically tailored to what I think will be a very significant computing model in the coming years.
The Atom, designed for what Intel calls “mobile Internet devices” isn’t a performance part. I haven’t yet seen or performed benchmarks on production equipment, but from what we know of its architecture, I’m guessing roughly Pentium III performance levels, or slightly lower. It’s not multi-core and it doesn’t have a huge cache. It’s certainly not going to go into performance gaming systems.
What it does offer is very low power consumption. It’s still an X86 processor, and will still run Windows or (more likely) Linux, but it has a TDP (thermal design power) of 2.4 watts for the 1.8GHz part.
Compare that to, say, the current Eee PC 900 processor, the Celeron M ULV 353, which runs at 900MHz and has a TDP of 5 watts. That’s twice the clock speed at half the power usage for the Atom. I can’t yet say that the Atom actually runs twice as fast (it probably doesn’t), but it should foster a new generation of devices that can do some heavy lifting when it comes to say, video decoding, but won't cost a bomb nor suck up so much power that you don’t get to see the end of your movie before the battery dies.
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