Written by: Kenneth Kwok
In some of the latest news posted on Netbook updates, the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ outperforms the Intel Atom. Not only that, but it is able to be more power efficient than the Intel Atom. This seems to be some great news for AMD, but is it as good as it sounds. So based on the article from Tom's Hardware, I will try and summarize and to put this all into perspective
It may seem too good to be true that AMD finally has something to fight back at Intel with. Even I was surprised when I first read through the title of the article. I decided to read through the article and try my best to find how good it really is in comparison to the Intel Atom. So let's sift through the results.
By just reading through the review, it is pretty easy to see that the AMD Athlon 2000+ has better performance and is much more power efficient than the Intel Atom. Although it seems to be a clear winner and could be easily implemented into more and more Nettops and Netbooks, there are factors that need to be considered.
Firstly in the article, they used two different sized platforms for the motherboards. The Intel Atom is using a Mini ITX platform, while the AMD Athlon 2000+ is using a new Micro ATX board. These boards are very different in size as seen in this photo.
Even though these boards are different, there are some 780G Mini ITX platform motherboards such as the J & W Minix 780G-SP128MB Mini ITX 780G. That would have made the comparison more fair since the boards are of different sizes. Although, the results would still be quite close to the original results.
So why exactly does the AMD Athlon 2000+ outperform the Intel Atom? Well, the biggest difference is probably the chipset. The AMD uses the most up to date AMD 780G chipset which is superior to the outdated Intel 945GC chipset. The Intel 945GC chipset, is not only old, but it is not the most power efficient chipset on the market today. The new chipsets such as the Intel P45 chipsets are more power efficient and will definitely give a performance boost.
The best thing that Intel could do at this point is to provide another chipset or allow a 3rd party to make a chipset for their Intel Atom platform and allow 3rd parties to produce their own motherboards for the Atom. Not only would that provide more power efficient and better performance UMPCs, Netbooks and Nettops, but it would also allow more choices in the market for motherboards for the Intel Atom.
In the end, it may seem that the AMD Athlon 2000+ is a much better choice than the Intel Atom for most newer UMPCs, Netbooks and Nettops. The part where AMD has to work on would be the pricing for their AMD Athlon 2000+. It is said to cost roughly $90 for the stripped down processor. That is about three times the price of the Intel Atom. Not only that but the motherboard would cost much more than the Intel motherboard, which would set the overall price of the AMD rig to cost at least double the price of a Intel rig. If you still believe in the original concept of the UMPC in being a cheap and lightweight device, the Intel Atom is still the reigning champion in this sector. If you don't care about the price anymore and just care about performance than the AMD Athlon 2000+ would make a great addition to your future UMPC.