Atom-powered Eee PC landing in June

[HEXUS]

Hold your horses folks, the imminent Eee PC 900 looks tasty, but as we expected, an Atom-powered upgrade will follow shortly after.

Read more.

[Bonnie]

Sounds great!

[Salazaar]

If I end up buying one at all it'll have to be the Atom powered one.

[nichomach]

Fingers crossed for usage of the 1.6GHz Atom, not the 1.1GHz, but assuming that, then it'd be rude not to.

[dangel]

Two questions:

1. will it be faster than the current CPU? I hear conflicting reports.

2. How much better will battery life be? We're not talking about a 50% power reduction are we now?

Reviews say the 900 gets a mere 2-2.5 hours of life out of it's battery - I don't think we're going to see that double with the atom.

I don't think the atom-powered eee will cost less either tbh.

[directhex]

atom is about 2-2.5x slower than pentium-m, clock for clock

question is, how are the clocks?

[TheAnimus]

Atom should be cheaper thou Dangel?

if we see an improvement to 3 hours battery life, cheaper, and even if there is no performance increase, thats still makes it much more attractive.

[nichomach]

Atom should be faster than a 900MHz Celery and it's a 45nm part. Their TDP is VERY low - Intel are claiming 2.0-2.3W depending on whether it's the 1.1 or 1.6GHz part, as opposed to, say, 35W for a Core2Duo mobile part ( Intel Announces Intel® Atom™ Brand for New Family of Low-Power Processors ). Standard Celeron-Ms start at 21W and go up to 31W. The ULV parts vary between 5.5 and 7W, but are a lot slower ( Intel® Celeron® M Processor for Embedded Computing - Specfications ). I doubt we'll see double the life with Atom, but I think that we WILL see a significant improvement.

[dangel]

Atom should be cheaper thou Dangel?

if we see an improvement to 3 hours battery life, cheaper, and even if there is no performance increase, thats still makes it much more attractive.

The atom might cost Asus less but I can't see them pricing the 900A less as a result in all honesty. Why bother? I mean, it sounds faster (bigger number) and they can claim better battery life (no matter how slim)

If i underclock from 900mhz to 630mhz (aka 701) will i not also see a battery life improvement?
I'm not banking on a performance increase at all - in fact, it could well go the other way with it being slower..

Extended battery packs are on ebay for the 701 - that's probably the only way we'll really see a useful improvement. I'd rather be dead wrong in all honesty

Either way i'm waiting till June to see what the reviews say. I want benchmarks!

[Andaho]

What makes you suggest the atom will be slower? I don't like the sound of that.

[slypie]

I agree I don't think Asus will drop the price of the Atom EeePC's. They may drop the price of the Celeron one's to clear stock though.

[R3MF]

What makes you suggest the atom will be slower? I don't like the sound of that.

it is an in-order design, probably not a great deal faster clock4clock then Via's in-order C7 chip.

[nichomach]

it is an in-order design, probably not a great deal faster clock4clock then Via's in-order C7 chip.

C7 doesn't use hyper-threading, though, and all Atoms from 1.33GHz up do, which could help ( PDF-age ).

[dangel]

So will the atom need to run at least at 1.8ghz to compete on throughput?

[R3MF]

C7 doesn't use hyper-threading, though, and all Atoms from 1.33GHz up do, which could help ( PDF-age ).

true, but it will still be slow compared to any out of order architecture including Via's new Isaiah.

[Andaho]

So will the atom need to run at least at 1.8ghz to compete on throughput?

why is that? I thought the current eee uses a 900mhz?