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Power Consumption

The main advantage the Atom 330 has is low power consumption - supposedly it has a maximum total power draw of 8W.

Here is some experimental data:

• E8500 @ 3.16GHz on Asus P5E3 Premium: 92W idle, 118W loaded
• Atom 330 @ 1.6GHz on Intel D945GCLF2: 41W idle, 45W loaded

So it looks like going to full load from idling at the desktop the Atom 330 only used 4W more - so the 8W TDP figure is quite believable.

If Intel had used a less power hungry chipset for the motherboard they could have built a motherboard that idles at 10W or less, and uses less than 14W fully loaded!

Now why does this matter to us?

Let's say I make a home server for all my media files. Most of the time it would be idling... so let's calculate how much power would be used in a year.

24h/day * 365 days = 8760 hours

Atom 330 @ 41W * 8760 hours = 359,160 W/hr = 359.16kWhr

E8500 @ 92W * 8760 hours = 805,920 W/hr = 805.92kWhr

Now let's say we pay $0.10/kWhr

Atom 330 would use $35.91 in electricity running for a year

E8500 would use $80.59 in electricity running for a year.

Now let's say we are in a place that charges $0.25/kWhr

Atom 330: $89.79 for a year

E8500: $201.48 for a year

Where electricity is expensive, a small Atom 330 based home server would save the cost of the motherboard in less than a year!

As an aside, I have no idea why Intel insists on a 4-pin additional power connector - there is no way that the board really needs it, yet the manual warns that it may damage the board if it is run without it.

Conclusion

We have to put things into perspective. These days we tend to forget just how much processing power we have available to us.

The early VAX 11/780 "supercomputers" ran at one million instructions per second.

The first Cray ran at 80MHz, and its successor, the Cray X-MP was rated at 800MFLOPs - that is, 800,000,000 floating point operations per second.

Hang on a second.

On page 12 we see that the Atom 330 scored 6,744 Whetsones (6,744 million Whetstone operations).

That's 6.744 BILLION Whetstone operations per second.That's more than eight times as fast as a Cray X-MP.

The fact of the matter is that except for 3D games, large databases, and very compute-intensive applications such as MPEG2/4/H.264 encoding, an Atom 330 will more than do the job for a regular desktop user. If Intel did not limit expansion to a sole PCI slot, adding a decent GPU would even enable usable gaming.

The D945GCLF2 costs about $90. Add a 2GB memory stick for about $33. A small mini-ITX case with power supply for about $40. Add $50 for a hard drive - these days you will get at least 250GB for that, 500GB if you are lucky. Add a $25 DVD burner, and $25 for a cheap keyboard and mouse. Download and install Ubuntu. You don't even need a monitor, you can use the S-Video output to display 800x600 (almost) to your TV.

Guess what?

You have just built a nice little general purpose computer for $263, and its only the size of a shoe box. And it is about eight times the floating point performance of a Cray XM-P, which was classified as a weapon.

Want it even cheaper? Lose the hard drive and dvd burner, use a $10 1GB flash stick for pendrivelinux. You only spend $198 then!

I am as guilty - if not more so - as the next guy in wanting faster computers all the time. I love overclocking and tweaking the last drop of performance out of systems; but the fact is that for normal, every day usage, the Atom will do.

Ok, I would not use it as a high end server, for video editing, or rendering (for those tasks, I'd use a Core 2 Duo or Quad). But browsing, email, spreadsheets, wordprocessing?

You don't need any more.

And neither do I.