Hi Janusz, On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 11:31 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, I got Atom 330 with this motherboard sice six months or so. > > http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D-overview.htm > > The machine runs all right, but the compilation times are similar to *very* > outdated Celeron 1.7 GHz (which is one core only). The Atom goes very snappy > on every other task it performs (software mirror, backup, rsync, remote NX > station, email, iscsi, puppet, pulseaudio server etc.), > > but > > compilation times *are* slow.
Your reply has been the most relevent to date, having been the only person who has an Atom 330 device for reference. After reading about your compilation speeds, I did a bit of googling for "intel core 2 duo vs intel atom 330", and found [1] which reveals quite a lot. It would seem that all of the Atom 330 "slowdowns" are caused by memory latency. It seems, that the Atom (both the 230 and 330) were not designed to use the blazingly fast FSB frequencies that all other modern Intel processors use, which is likely the primary reason for (sub-par) performance, and probably also the reason for their low power consumption. Most of the 45nm Core-2 processors support FSB frequencies around 1 or 1.3 GHz. On the other hand, the Atom 330 only supports FSB frequencies of 533 MHz. In terms of silicon / FETs, high clock speeds == high power leakage. So essentially, if the clock speeds of a Duo and Atom core were the same, then the Atom would require twice as much time as the Duo for the the same amount of "work" (i.e. memory reads / writes). Assuming that the Atom in-use power is about 1/2 of the duo, then both systems consume the same amount of power for a "task", but the Atom takes twice as long. In reality, the Atom consumes over half of the Duo in-use power. Therefore, power-efficiency ironically favours the Intel Core-2 Duo rather than the Atom for computation-intensive applications. For multimedia, I would say that the Atom is slightly more power-efficient. In my estimation, the lower in-use power of the Atom would be lost if it used a 1.3 GHz FSB controller. Does anyone disagree? Conclusion: The main bottleneck on the Atom 330 is not the CPU frequency, but rather the FSB frequency. Therefore, for a dedicated HTPC and / or NAS device, the an Intel Atom 330 device is a good choice. For a dedicated, low-power build machine, the Atom 330 is a bad choice for performance, but a good choice if only moderate performance is required. For a box that is intended to be used for HTPC / NAS and also a dedicated low-power build machine, an Atom 330 device is still a decent choice, because at least it performs efficiently for 2 out of 3 functions, and it's unlikely (physically impossible?) that one will find a comparable dual-core, low-power, fanless (and not liquid cooled) device with a 1.3 GHz FSB. So ... yea, I think I'll probably grab one of these ZOTAC boards anyway, at least for having an HTPC. Using it as a dedicated build machine would still be useful, even if the performance isn't particularly great. In any event, it won't be building packages constantly for my purposes, but only periodically. Cheers, Chris [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-core-atom-330,2141-6.html [2] http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/specifications.htm [3] http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLG9Y
