Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 21, 2009 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
There’s a lot to talk about so let’s take it piece by piece.
First, new vs. old Atom. With a real world performance improvement approaching 10% on the desktop, I’m happy with the performance of Pine Trail. Short of Intel introducing a brand new architecture, Atom isn’t going to get much better, so the fact that we’re getting anything is worth being happy about.
The impact of the on-die memory controller is noticeable on overall system performance. As I said earlier, my Pine Trail testbed was snappier and more responsive than my older Atom machines. It’s by no means fast, but it’s noticeably faster than before.
Power consumption is also much improved thanks to Intel ditching the archaic 945 chipset. Although the impact on battery life in netbooks is going to be more exciting than drawing less power at the wall. Pine Trail is worth waiting for.
Intel's Atom D510 board (left), Intel's Atom 330 board (right)
Atom continues to deliver good enough performance but not for a primary system. As our results have shown, even very low end dual core Pentium processors are multiple times faster than Atom. If you’re building a primary PC for yourself, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.
Where Atom shines is in its ability to drive a low cost, low power machine. The Intel motherboard we featured here is going to retail for around $75 new - that includes the CPU, integrated graphics and heatsink. All you need is storage, a PSU and memory and you’ve got a complete system. Anyone who has been through a couple of upgrades should have most of the necessary components.
What Pine Trail doesn’t do is address the HTPC applications for Atom at all. While it’s true that you can play most 720p x264 content on a dual-core Atom without hardware acceleration, you don’t get the sort of problem-free play-everything experience that you do with Atom + Ion. You can set up a very functional, very capable HTPC that can play high definition content based on Ion - you can’t do the same with Pine Trail.
It’s even worse now that Flash finally has DXVA support. It’s not just a matter of making high definition content playable, it’s about making sites like Hulu and Youtube more usable. Full H.264 decode acceleration would make Pine Trail much more appealing.
If you can live without the HTPC features and Flash acceleration, Pine Trail is better than Ion. If you can't, then the decision becomes a tradeoff. Do you take better video playback performance in exchange for worse application/system performance? Or vice versa?
Our Pine Trail system (left), Zotac's Ion-based Mag (right)
Perhaps we’ll see more vendors choose to bundle 3rd party H.264 decoders and hopefully they’ll work as seamlessly as the GPU based solutions, but without them I believe NVIDIA’s Ion platform has a purpose.
I haven’t been NVIDIA’s biggest supporter in its lawsuit against Intel. For the most part I don’t see any value in NVIDIA’s chipsets anymore. In fact since NVIDIA’s departure from the market we’ve finally achieved the holy grail: vendor agnostic multi-GPU support on many motherboards (CF/SLI are well supported on X58/P55). The one exception is Ion. Without Ion there would be nothing to pressure Intel to enable H.264 acceleration on its Atom chipsets. I’m sure Intel will eventually enable it, but it sure is taking a long time - who knows how much longer it would be had NVIDIA not been such a pest. The temptation of more profit on an already low margin platform tends to trump innovation, even at the most engineering heavy companies.
If NVIDIA had a DMI/QPI license I’m not sure we’d have SLI on Intel chipsets, and the past few enthusiast NVIDIA chipsets weren’t without their issues. On the other hand, without a third party chipset vendor we don’t have someone to keep Intel in check. It’s not a problem in areas where AMD is competitive, but what about areas in which they’re not? Even worse, what happens if AMD’s fortunes take another turn for the worse? I’m not a fortune teller and I don’t know which one is technically the lesser of two evils, it’s just food for thought.
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Shadowmaster625 - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
Why doesnt AMD just take one of their upcoming mobile 880 series northbridges and add a memory controller and a single Athlon core? It would be faster than atom, more efficient than Ion, and could be binned for low power. Instead they just stand there with their thumbs up their butts while Intel shovels this garbage onto millions of unsuspecting consumers at even higher profit margins.JarredWalton - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
The problem is that even single core Athlons are not particularly power friendly. I'm sure they could get 5-6 hours of battery life if they tried hard, but Atom can get twice that.Hector1 - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
Do you want some whine with that ? Where were you when chipsets were created by taking a bunch of smaller ICs on the motherboard and putting them altogether into one IC ? PCs became cheaper and faster. We thought it was great. Do you know anything about L2 Cache ? It used to be separate on the motherboards as well until it was integrated into the CPU. PCs became cheaper and faster and we thought it was great. Remember when CPUs were solo ? They became Duo & Quad making the PCs faster and dropping price/performance. AMD & Intel integrated the memory controller and, whoa!, guess what ? Faster & lower price/performance and, yes, we thought it was great. It's called Moore's Law and it's all been part of the semiconductor revolution that's still going on since the '60s. GPUs are no different. They're still logic gates made out of transistors and with new 32nm technology, then 22nm and 16nm, the graphics logic will be integrated as well. Seriously, what did you think would happen ?TETRONG - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
Do you understand that Moore's Law is not a force of nature?Intel has artificially handicapped the low-voltage sector in order to force consumers to purchase Pentiums. Right where they wanted you all along.
Since when is it ok for Intel to dictate what type of systems are created with processors?
First it was the 1GB of Ram limitation, now you can't have a dual-core. When does it end?
"We have a mediocre CPU, combined with a below average GPU-according to our amortization schedule you could very well have it in the year 2013(after the holidays of course), by which time we should have our paws all over the video encoding and browsing standards, which we'll be sure to make as taxing as possible. Official release of USB 3.0 will be right up in a jiff!
Voldenuit - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
The historical examples you cite are not analagous, because intel bundling their anemic GPUs onto the package makes performance *worse*, and bundling the two dies onto a single package (they're not on the same chip, either, so there is no hard physical limitation) makes competing IGPs more expensive, since you now have to pay for a useless intel IGP as well as a 3rd party one if you were going to buy an IGP system.And just because a past course of action was embraced by the market does not mean it was not anti-competitive.
bnolsen - Saturday, December 26, 2009 - link
Performance is worse?? As far as I can see the bridge requires no heat sink and the cpu can be cooled passively. Power use went way down. For this plaform that is improved performance.My current atom netbooks do fine playing flash on their screens and just fine playing 720p h264 mkv files.
If you want a bunch of power use and heat, just skip the ion platform and go with a core2 based system.
Hector1 - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
You need to re-read the tech articles. Pineview does integrate both the graphics and memory controller into the CPU. It's the ICH that remains separate. Even if it didn't, what do you think will happen when this goes to 32nm, 22nm and 16nm ? As for performance, Anand says in the title "Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power" so that's good enough for me.Intel obviously created the Atom for a low cost, low power platform and they're delivering. It'll continue to be fine-tuned with more integration to lower costs. The market obviously wants it. SOC is coming too (System On a Chip) for even lower costs. Not the place for high performance graphics, I think.
This is really about Moore's Law marching on. It's driven down prices, increased performances and lowered power more than anything else on the planet. Without it, we'd still be paying the $5000 I paid for my 1st PC in 1980 -- an Apple II Plus. What you're saying, whether you know it or not, is that we should stop advancing processes and stop Moore's Law. Personally, I'd like to see us not stop at 45nm and keep going.
kaoken - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
I agree that progress should be made, but bundling an intel cpu and IGP into a chip is anti-competitive. I wouldn't mind though if there were an intel cpu and ati/nvidia on a chip.JonnyDough - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - link
Hector is right in one respect, and that is that if Intel is going to be dumb, we don't have to purchase their products. I especially like the sarcastic cynicism in the article when mentioning all the things that Intel's chip CAN'T do. They just don't know how to make a GPU without patent infringement. If they can't compete, they'll try using their big market share to hurt competition. Classic Intel move. They never did care about innovation, only about market share and money. But I guess that's what happens when you're a mega corp with lots of stockholder expectations and pressure. I'll give my three cheers to the underdogs!overvolting - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
Hear Hear