Atom vs. Opteron and an unlikely winner ...

Quicksearch

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< New Xeon server from Sun: X2250 and X4250 | Central Park >

Atom vs. Opteron and an unlikely winner ...

Wednesday, August 20. 2008

Interestingly the most power-efficient desktop platform isn´t the purpose-build Atom CPU from Intel. It´s an AMD Opteron. Tom´s Hardware found this in tests (i don´t like this news outlet but sometimes there are some good articles there) A good example for "the system is key": Even when you CPU runs at two watts, a CPU alone doesn´t compute a single command. You need a power-efficient chipset as well. And the chipset is the achilles heel of Atom at the moment.

PS: That´s good news, i was afraid of being forced to buy Intel for my next homeserver ....

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, The IT Business at 07:45 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

"i was afraid of being forced to buy Intel for my next homeserver"

Well, if you cannot max out a Opteron with useful work, for sure the Atom will be much more efficient

. And interestingly, if you also factor in the resources necessary to build a new machine, a rather inefficient, old, but otherwise unused machine might turn out to be the most ecological for a given task.

#1 Christian Vogel on 2008-08-20 09:54 (Reply)

Maxing out the Opteron isn´t a problem, as the system would be an SunRay server as well ...

#1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-08-20 10:25 (Reply)

There is also a much better, power efficient Atom chipset, if they would use this with the Atom 230, then the Atom system would be (much) better.

However the chipset is much more expensive and used only with high priced Atom Z ... chips in fancy sub notebooks designs.

I hope that there are some alternative Atom mainboards in the future, e.g. with an nvidia chipset. I assume that a nV chipset(with dual channel DDR2/3), coupled with the new Atom 330 (dual core, 4 threads, TDP 8W) would be a very good server setup.

cheers

Alex

#2 Alex on 2008-08-22 17:41 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry