Intel CPU comparison: P4 vs Atom

[Dan Andersson]

I decided for installing the Intel sponsored Moblin Linux. It's basically a distribution with support for the common Atom based machines. It's now a part of the Linux Foundation so there will be much integration with the major distributions like Ubuntu and an Android execution environment

MvH Dan Andersson

[sje]

Official site: http://www.acer.com/aspireone/about.html

Independent user forum: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/index.php

Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

[sje]

I decided for installing the Intel sponsored Moblin Linux. It's basically a distribution with support for the common Atom based machines. It's now a part of the Linux Foundation so there will be much integration with the major distributions like Ubuntu and an Android execution environment

Acer is producing new modes faster than the developers can code the needed free drivers. Also, Acer is producing downloadable BIOS upgrades that further make tracking difficult. There is a whole line of Acer netbooks and each seems to have its own ensemble of third party hardware. I predict that support for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions will be much improved by the end of the year.

My model has support for an optional Bluetooth card (I'll use a USB dongle instead if I need BT; there are three USB ports) and an optional 3G/WIMAX card (I'll skip that for now). I've got the three cell battery that gives about two hours of heavy computing time; I might get the six cell battery later. There's a single SoDIMM memory slot that came with a one GB 533 MHz DIMM; it can handle a two GB DIMM for maximum memory expansion. There's an SD slot and an SD memory card can be used as a disk (and be made bootable, too).

The keyboard is small but of high quality. I switched the keycaps to the Dvorak layout without any problems. I'd prefer a matte screen over the glossy one, but matte notebooks of any size are a rarity nowadays. I haven't tried the camera yet and in fact am unsure of support for it being available under Ubuntu.

[mclane]

first atom tournament...

http://schachcomputerwelt.foren-city.de ... 00mhz.html

[sje]

Update: The camera does work under Ubuntu; I used the cheese and luvcview programs for testing. Still no luck with the wired Ethernet, but the wireless interface runs at the full 802.11g speed, so that's not much of a problem. The wireless reception is good but one step below that of my Apple notebooks. Minor point: the LED indicator for the wireless Ethernet activity does not work.

The LED illuminated display is bright and sharp. But for those used to high quality LCD screens, the display on the Acer has a much restricted usable viewing angle. This isn't much of a problem unless more than one person at a time needs to see the display.

The GUI (not Xboard) used for Gnuchess when selected from the default games menu pick has problems with square highlighting. Xboard itself does work as expected. The latest version of Crafty available via Synaptic is three major versions behind the current release.

[Bo Persson]

Search times:

3.0 GHz P4: 13m 31s (811 seconds)
1.6 GHz Atom: 19m 49s (1189 seconds)

The factor is 1.47 in favor of the P4. When normalized for clock frequency, the factor is 1.27 in favor of the Atom.

I would not think is fair to normalize clock frequency because P4 architecture is very different from Atom one and is made so to allow very high frequency with the same silicon technology of P3 that is more similar to the Atom one.

True. The P4 was specifically designed to have a higher clock frequency than the AMD Athlon, no matter what.

The fact that everyone else does 30-50% more work per clock cycle is not a surprise, it is all by design.

To use the old car analogy, Intel P4 had about the same horse power as everyone else, but at at higher rpm. Surprisingly, they were successful in marketing this as an advantage.

[sje]

Code: Select all

sje@brigid:~/tmp$ crafty
hash table memory =   12M bytes.
pawn hash table memory =    2M bytes.
show book statistics
EGTB access enabled
using tbpath=/var/lib/crafty/TB
0 piece tablebase files found
parallel threads disabled.


Crafty v20.14 (1 cpus)

White(1): bench
Running benchmark. . .
......
Total nodes: 36632576
Raw nodes per second: 469648
Total elapsed time: 78
White(1): bench
Running benchmark. . .
......
Total nodes: 36632576
Raw nodes per second: 463703
Total elapsed time: 79
White(1): bench
Running benchmark. . .
......
Total nodes: 36632576
Raw nodes per second: 469648
Total elapsed time: 78
White(1): quit

[Bill Rogers]

Update: The camera does work under Ubuntu; I used the cheese and luvcview programs for testing. Still no luck with the wired Ethernet, but the wireless interface runs at the full 802.11g speed, so that's not much of a problem. The wireless reception is good but one step below that of my Apple notebooks. Minor point: the LED indicator for the wireless Ethernet activity does not work.

The LED illuminated display is bright and sharp. But for those used to high quality LCD screens, the display on the Acer has a much restricted usable viewing angle. This isn't much of a problem unless more than one person at a time needs to see the display.

The GUI (not Xboard) used for Gnuchess when selected from the default games menu pick has problems with square highlighting. Xboard itself does work as expected. The latest version of Crafty available via Synaptic is three major versions behind the current release.

I have a Acer Aspire and found that everything works just fine. The LED indicator is connected to a switch and most likely your is turned off. Just puch the silver button where the light comes from and it will turn on again.
I also found the camera to work jsut fine. My son turned me on to Skypes which is a program that lets you talk to people all over the country usnig your PC. If the person you are callind is also using Skpes then you get a two way picture phone in that you can see each other like live TV.
One last thing though I am still using XP.
Bill

[sje]

It turns out that there is a significant amateur community dedicated to running non Windows operating systems on the AAO. Most everything can be made to work under Linux, but not yet without manual intervention (i.e., searching out specialized patches and drivers along with a willingness to test). So I'll live without the WiFi LED (the WiFi itself works) until the Ubuntu 9.10 release that will come in a few months.

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I should note that in the above Crafty test, the executable was compiled for a single core machine, not the 1.15 core machine that is the Atom hyperthreaded CPU. So perhaps the bench output node frequency would have been a bit higher has a two core version been used.

Symbolic automatically detects the core count (and thinks there are two of them in an Atom), so it doesn't need different executables. Of course, Symbolic naively trusts the core count value and doesn't understand that the second "core" is mostly a sham.

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The Ubuntu default X Window manager senses the F11 key toggle that puts the display in full screen mode. This is very handy for temporarily removing the upper and lower status bars to maximize the use of the 600 pixel vertical resolution. In full screen mode a terminal window can show 33 lines of 123 characters each (at once, with a decent font), and with a vertical scroll elevator bar on the right.

All in all, not bad for a machine that costs only US$300.

[Dan Andersson]

Next Atom generation is rumoured to be 64 bit so we should see a speed gain for Crafty and other bitboard programs. Other parts of the rumour are good news/bad news. Less power draw, fewer chips, faster graphics, HD decode are the good ones. No virtualization support leading to the Win 7 compatability solution being borked, GMA500 graphics chip being purchased IP (PowerVR) meaning exotic OS drivers are unlikely to be fast to appear and/or buggy and substandard.

MvH Dan Andersson