Processors Toolkit

Story: Netbook platforms: VIA Nano v. Intel Atom

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Certainly Not Incompetent

As far as I am concerned, in order to be interesting and useful these tests have to give some indication of "real world" performance, and there is no better way of doing that than to include equivalent tests on a known reference processor. I don't care how much faster of slower the Atom and VIA are compared to each other, if I don't know how they are going to compare to something I already know. Thus, including the desktop processor in the tests was an excellent idea.

As for testing the Atom over-clocked, why on earth would they want to do that? First, how many netbook buyers are going to know how to over-clock a CPU, or even know that it can be done? Second, what is the "expected use" of a netbook - is it likely to be used for something that is so CPU intensive that over-clocking will be worthwhile? Third, and perhaps most importantly, in my experience one of the largest problems with netbooks is the amount of heat that they generate, so why on earth would one want to over-clock the CPU and thus produce even more heat?

jw 11/2/2009

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