Today's netbooks are mostly Intel Atom-powered, but that could change with the advent of VIA's Nano processor, which outperforms Intel's CPU in several areas.
Introduction
Despite the rapidly cooling economic climate, netbooks sold like hot cakes last year. The boom in small, affordable, notebooks looks likely to continue this year. Most netbook manufacturers use Intel's Atom processor along with the somewhat dated G945 graphics chipset.
The main criticisms leveled at netbooks centre on poor performance. AMD chief Dirk Meyer predicts the netbook's demise, while Nvidia president Jen Hsun Huang has criticised the weak performance of the Atom platform and announced a graphics chipset that's designed to address the Atom's deficiencies. This Nvidia chipset, called Ion, could give a significant boost to Atom-based netbooks. Ion has a clear edge over any graphics option than Intel can currently muster. On top of that, Ion can use Nvidia's CUDA parallel computing interface to perform calculations for certain non-graphics applications. The arithmetic performance of the graphics chip far exceeds that of the main processor.
Some manufacturers view the VIA Nano processor as a viable alternative for netbooks. Samsung has just released the NC20, which is equipped with a particularly energy-efficient variant of the Nano chip. The benchmark tests presented here examine the VIA and Intel chips. Nvidia's Ion is not yet available, but is due to appear in April.
Test models and platforms
We looked at the two main netbook processors, the 1.8GHz VIA Nano L2100 and the 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230. We used standard motherboards from the two manufacturers — VIA's Epia SN and Intel's 'Little Falls' D945GCFL, which are both equipped with 2GB of RAM as standard. Intel manufactures the Atom using a 45-nanometre (nm) feature size, while VIA still uses 65nm technology. For this reason, the VIA Nano uses more power than Intel's Atom. But there are some particularly energy-efficient models in the Nano range, which can match the Atom for power consumption. Samsung's new NC20, for example, uses a 1.3GHz VIA Nano that consumes a nominal 8W.
The internal architecture of the two processors differs significantly. To save power at the expense of speed, the Atom dispenses with out-of-order instruction processing, unlike the Nano which in theory can thus offer faster instruction processing. But the Atom partly makes up for this disadvantage by using hyperthreading. Our benchmarks show which of the two architectures performs best in practice. For reference, we compared the netbook results with a conventional desktop machine based on a 2.5GHz dual-core Pentium E5200.
2%
4%
To me it seems quite incorrect to classify the Atom 230 as one of the main netbook processors. Certainly the main netbook processor is currently the Atom N270, which is a rather different processor. For one, it does not support x86-64 instructions. It would be wise not to exptrapolate from the 230's results.