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Home » General

Intel is loosing the battle against VIA in the UMPC field

Posted by ctitanic on March 7, 2008 – 8:05 am
closeThis post was published 1 year 8 months 2 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

Well, at least that’s my opinion after analyzing two years of fiascos coming from Intel. Last year was completely lost because the best that Intel could release was the A110 and A100, two processors that did not give a extra battery life worth to mention because we have plenty of examples of other UMPC using even Core Solo with about the same battery life. The A110 and A100 performance was about the same than what we see in the second generation of VIA processors. Now Intel just released the Atom. And what we have there, lets check this chart posted at JKonTheRun.

intel_atom_benchmark1

 

Once again the new processor from Intel specially designed for UMPC and MID performs worse than the old Celeron M at 900 MHz. There are even few reports about A110 processors out performing this Atom score. So for two years on the road Intel has not been able to release a better processor from the point of view of performance and there are some reports that the Atom even does not support Aero in Vista. If you compare this to what is going on with VIA processors you will see a different picture there. VIA has upgraded its processors for UMPC two times in the same period and in both cases we have seen a gain in performance and battery life. So, who is winning this battle? Evidently VIA. VIA processor still do not out perform in some cases the A110 and Atom processors in performance but if they continue doing what they have been doing I wont be surprised to see a faster VIA processor before this year ends.

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ctitanic (728 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Working as IT Professional since 1994. IT Manager since 1999. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Tablet PC/UMPC since 2007. Owner/writer of www.ultramobilepc-tips.com . Published many articles in todoUMPC Magazine, www.todoUMPCmagazine.com, the first online magazine all about UMPCs. Maker of Tweaks2K2, a registry hacking tool for Pocket PC devices (www.tweaks2k2.com).


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  • ctitanic
    About SuperPI, I agree, that would not be the tool that I would have used to show what that processor is capable of. But it gives me a very good idea. ;)
  • ctitanic
    Ed, you are being to nice to Intel, to me it's not that the UMPC sales have not been that good. Look in this site and you will find a news I posted few weeks ago about what the OEMs sales plans are for this year. We are talking about millions. The fact that I see is that Intel is not capable of delivering the right processor for UMPC. If a UMPC is not powerful enough for running Vista then what you have virtually is a MID. And that's why they are changing plans and putting more effort in to those little weak devices.

    In few word, Intel is not capable at this moment of making a processor small enough for UMPC to run Vista and have a decent battery life (~3 to 4 hours). And VIA is working better on this field. We had only few UMPC with VIA almost two years ago. Today we have almost half of the market running on VIA. That's another fact.
  • Chaz over at NotebookReview.com made a good point. SuperPi is not multithreaded and does not allow the Silverthorne/Atom chip to reach its full potential, as it is HyperThreaded. So this test isn't exactly fair.

    ————-
    Ed Hardy
    http://www.Brighthand.com
  • > Ed, if you are not able to run freely Vista in a UMPC then
    > you are saying goodbye to Microsoft. ;) And that’s what
    > Intel is virtually doing.

    I wouldn't say Intel is saying goodbye to Microsoft, but with the very lack-luster sales of the UMPC category of devices, Intel is embracing Linux for low-cost mobile devices. And this isn't me reading between the lines; Intel has flat out said that devices running Atom should use Linux rather than Windows.

    Maybe this sounds like heresy to the Microsoft faithful, but the success of the Eee PC shows that devices that look like laptops don't need to run Windows to be successful.

    ————-
    Ed Hardy
    http://www.Brighthand.com
  • ctitanic
    Ed, if you are not able to run freely Vista in a UMPC then you are saying goodbye to Microsoft. ;) And that's what Intel is virtually doing.
  • ctitanic
    In a few words summarizing my post. I do see a progress on VIA from the point of view of UMPCs that I do not see it on Intel.
  • ctitanic
    uday, I said that because I do not see any real progress from Intel side but I do see a progress on VIA's.

    About the battery figures I'm commenting what I read from UMPCPortal in their brief test of one of those. 3,5 hours is what the Q1 with VIA processor was getting a long time ago. So I'm not impressed at all.
  • I don't think Intel is trying for raw processor speed in the Atom. Rather, it's going for small size and low power requirements. I think these two are most important in a mobile device.

    Not that I'm completely defending Intel. I've been impressed with VIA's mobile processors and the UMPCs and Netbooks I've seen based on them.

    -------------
    Ed Hardy
    www.Brighthand.com
  • uday
    If VIA is not out performing any Intel processors, why do you say Intel is loosing the battle against VIA in the UMPC field?

    Where did you get Silverthorne battery test figures?? That is most interesting.
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