Intel’s Atom D510 And NM10 Express: Down The Pine Trail With D510MO

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It certainly is an improvement over the weak hearted Atom but I was expecting a bit more bang for the CPU's capabilities. Hopefully this will make Mini-ITX boards cheaper and more readily available for small servers and back up applications.
 

scook9

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My dad was looking at netbooks because he wanted something portable. What he ended up buying was the Dell Inspiron Mini 11z (not normally an inspiron fan). It has a Pentium Dual Core and the GM45 chipset (with HDMI output not VGA). This little 11" notebook gets over 6 hours of battery life and will run circles around either generation of atom processors and their chipsets/graphics. Yes the 11z did cost more than the other netbooks, but you got alot more for it, something to think about :)
 

matt87_50

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wow, thats pretty terrible, one wonders how much better that new cpu integrated graphics is than the old chip set integrated? as basic as the ion system is, you can do anything with it, media center decoding HD, playing a couple of games, and as a file server, all with the lowest power consumption, this new one seems like its only good for the latter, and its only 3W less power.

however, a file server / NAS alternative with the lowest possible power consumption is exactly what I'm after, so maybe its perfect for me, but I'd probably still go ION just because of the flexibility it offers in the future, should I get a new file server to replace it.

as for netbooks. If its a computer, I wanna be able to play games on it, and lets not forget about flash going 3D and hardware accelerated, I'd still go ION.

honestly, I wonder how they could make a GPU that crap in this day and age, the one in the iPhone and droid would be more powerful...
 

liquidsnake718

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I guess its not bad for beginners. I also have a netbook as my 3rd option.... I am rather enjoying the portability and functionality. As a HTCP or mini media center this sounds interesting for beginners that dont know how to build a PC... its almost plug and play..... this is a good option for them. I would prefer to get a mini-ITX board with at least a core 2 duo and build from there...... but then again, a PS2 is currently the king of this realm and you cannot compare as it has an HDMI, Great games, blu-ray, wifi, and everything one would need in this segment. Sorry the Cell is still far superior in this field!
 

djiezes

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Lack of HDMI, DVI or hardware accelerated decoding for MPEG4, x264 or h264 really does not make sense for a CPU/chipset that orients itself towards the desktop.
Originally I thought this new chip might've made sense for htpc use. ION still beats it & ION2 is coming soon. An ordinary low powered desktop CPU for htpc use still makes more sense. AMDs Athlon X2 240E for example (45W) or maybe an Intel Pentium E3200 or alike.
 

djiezes

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Lack of HDMI, DVI or hardware accelerated decoding for MPEG4, x264 or h264 really does not make sense for a CPU/chipset that orients itself towards the desktop.
Originally I thought this new chip might've made sense for htpc use. ION still beats it & ION2 is coming soon. An ordinary low powered desktop CPU for htpc use still makes more sense. AMDs Athlon X2 240E for example (45W) or maybe an Intel Pentium E3200 or alike.
 

yankeeDDL

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I have a question regarding the power efficiency. We see that in most tasks the Atoms are about 2X slower than the Pentium, and it seems to consume about 3~3,5X less under load.
I wonder if a real/fair comparison of power consumption should be made differently.
For example: if I watch a DVD on an Atom I need, say, 100% CPU, while on a Pentium I will need only 50% of it.
So I will have the Atom burning power under full load vs 50% of the Pentium.

In other words: the Pentium is much more powerful, so it does not need to run full speed to do the same.

So, is there really an advantage in the Atom? Can you get the power/performance ratio of an Atom by simply underclocking a Pentium by few %?
 

yankeeDDL

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I have a question regarding the power efficiency. We see that in most tasks the Atoms are about 2X slower than the Pentium, and it seems to consume about 3~3,5X less under load.
I wonder if a real/fair comparison of power consumption should be made differently.
For example: if I watch a DVD on an Atom I need, say, 100% CPU, while on a Pentium I will need only 50% of it.
So I will have the Atom burning power under full load vs 50% of the Pentium.

In other words: the Pentium is much more powerful, so it does not need to run full speed to do the same.

So, is there really an advantage in the Atom? Can you get the power/performance ratio of an Atom by simply underclocking a Pentium by few %?
 

huron

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I guess I expected more from them, especially considering they know what the complaints are against the current platform, and know the strengths of ion.

It feels like Intel quite get it right...again
 

masterasia

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I don't see any big improvement. The Atom still sucks and should only be available in third world countries like how it was intended or be used just for surfing the Internet and light word processing, nothing more.
 

intelliclint

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The new intergrted graphics should have supported DX 11 or atleast 10 and include play back of h.264 or VC-1 acceleration, as well as 8 pipes. These fetures aren't aimed at gaming but the systems target audience as web browsers, flash, and silverlight are soon going to support graphics acceleration.

Any idea if the intergrated graphics can be expanded using something like a hybrid or bypass option so nVidia can give us a real chipset?
 

rembo666

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I don't understand all the negative comments. Atom has always been about the cheapest way to get "good enough" performance to run a web browser. No less, no more. If you want to do more than that, buy a platform with a proper super-scalar CPU.
 

dealcorn

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The graphics discussion is accurate, but misses the mark. Ebay says I can buy Zotac ION-ITX-A-U with D330 for $167 versus about $70 for an Intel D945GCLF2D and I speculate that the D510NM will sell volumes at less than $80. Populate one of the PCIe lanes with a Broadcom Crystal HD Enhanced Media Accelerator (under $25) and you get ”a single-stream HD H.264/VC-1/WMV/MPEG-2 video decoder solution capable of full HD real-time decoding supporting Windows XP, Windows® 7 and the Linux® OS environments.” I will add a cheap PCIE tv capture card for analog signals so I need hardware assisted MPEG encoding for my headless HTPC server. Because I care about graphics, the Intel platform looks like a 37% savings out of pocket and daily energy cost savings to boot. Yes, the D510NM is a nothing release except that it blows away the competition in multiple market segments. Some relevant performance and energy use testing might be helpful.
 

dealcorn

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The graphics discussion is accurate, but misses the mark. Ebay says I can buy Zotac ION-ITX-A-U with D330 for $167 versus about $70 for an Intel D945GCLF and I speculate that the D510NM will sell volumes at less than $80. Populate one of the PCIe lanes with a Broadcom Crystal HD Enhanced Media Accelerator (under $25) and you get ”a single-stream HD H.264/VC-1/WMV/MPEG-2 video decoder solution capable of full HD real-time decoding supporting Windows XP, Windows® 7 and the Linux® OS environments.” I will add a cheap PCIE tv capture card for analog signals so I need hardware assisted MPEG encoding for my headless HTPC server. Because I care about graphics, the Intel platform looks like a 37% savings out of pocket and daily energy cost savings to boot. Yes, the D510NM is a nothing release except that it blows away the competition in multiple market segments. Some relevant performance and energy use testing might be helpful.
 

bounty

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The question is what does "good enough" mean to you. A 486 can do word processing and web browsing (with proper OS and software.) It can't really do flash stuff, but neither can Atom + intel chipset. Now where did I leave my Cyrix 5x86?
 

blarger

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Anyone else notice how often Tomshardware articles contain blatant grammar and spelling mistakes? Like they don't even spell check them before publishing.

This article has been out for how long? And the graphs are still missing data for the pinetrail results. how do you click the create article button without previewing to make sure your graphs aren't the working versions?

Tomshardware needs to get its quality standards together.

Also while this is certainly an improvement I agree how Atom is disappointingly underpowered. if it were 1.5 times as powerful it could handle HD decoding and gaming so much better. Its appeal in the American market would double as a "hey mom here's your new computer" type gift. Or an HTPC. Or a internet station.
 

nafhan

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Given Intel's planned transition to 32nm manufacturing in the next, well, couple of weeks, we were curious as to the timing of this launch at 45nm. After all, 32nm Atoms could make these power numbers even more compelling. Intel responded that there wasn't a definite time-line in place yet for such a move.
Intel is soon going to have a ton of unused 45nm capacity while they are transitioning from 45nm to 32nm. The plan is probably something along the lines of: transition the big, power hungry, money making chips first and then transition the Atom.
 
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I think it would be more fair to include modern mITX motherboards and low power Core 2 Duo CPUs. For instance, pairing an E5200 with an Intel DG45FC and using a PicoPSU with a high efficency power brick, the total power consumption when idle is around 30W with load power being 50W. I'm sure, with a bit of underclocking, it would be easy to get > 30W idle on the DG45FC. Where does that leave the Atom ? And the E5200 is a lot more versatile than the Atom - doing anything other than browsing ( ie running DivX + FFDShow might not be such a good idea on the D510
 

krolo

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We have hundreds of these at my NOC that i work at. They make great linux machines and can cram almost a hundred on a bakers rack.
 
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