[Leaplist] [Blog] Atom is for embedded, basic set-tops, UMPC, but not HTPC ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 15:53 -0500, Richard F. Ostrow Jr. wrote:
> While I have not yet looked at the Atom for HTPC needs, I'm a bit
> surprised that Intel would miss that market...

Intel didn't exactly "miss" it, but Atom itself isn't really yet
"designed" for it.  Atom is really, again, a superscalar
micro_controller_, not a microprocessor.  It is the replacement for
X-Scale (ARM ISA).  It's small.  It's simple.  It's low-power.  It's
designed to be glued with other cores, including multiple of its own.
It supports symmetric multi-threading across multiple cores.

The biggest problem with Atom right now is the lack of any chipset,
other than a moderate power (10W) 945 hack-job for UMPC, which you do
_not_ find in any Mini-ITX boards (only full 22W 945 + 3W ICH7).  Intel
has outsourced the GMA500 (PowerVR) and is planning a future
System-on-a-Chip (SoC) version, probably at the same time as the 32nm
feature size shrink.

In other words, Atom is definitely _not_ "low power" in its commodity
forms, only in UMPC (and even then the chipset is not the best) and for
embedded options (where the vendor often uses direct, local bus).

> I've put together a couple of Via machines (A C3-2 and a C7 CPU), the
> first of which was a home theatre PC roughly the size of a standard
> CD-ROM, the latter going into my car (Will anyone *ever* make a
> touchscreen that I can live with?!).

The sub-40W Atom + 945 option should be able to drive typical NTSC/PAL
overlays.  Linux support of these basic features are a whole other set
of questions though (whereas proprietary vendors, especially nVidia,
offer full support).  But at 40W, you're already closing in on a 50W
Sempron LE + 780G option, which isn't much more, but can absolutely
obliterate it (both in the CPU and, even more so, the 780G wipes the
floor with even the cutting-edge Intel G4x / GMA4500 -- even on
Windows).

> The HTPC worked quite well - it recorded live DivX streams from television
> over USB-2 via MythTV (provided you used a sufficiently old kernel - newer
> kernels dropped support for this tuner (plextor using go7007 module))...
> but it will *never* make a HD HTPC, there's quite simply not enough
> horsepower in that thing.

Your choice of tuner is likely "doing the work."  The output at HDTV
resolutions (720p is bad enough, but 1080p is killer) is really not
something you'll find outside of ATI 600+ (RS500+) or nVidia 7000+ (G70
+) integrated graphics.  Even on Windows, Intel is still having major,
major issues with its much newer G4x / GMA 4500, and you go back all the
way to the 900 series and it's not even a consideration.

Then you have the fact that Atom sucks at math matrix / SIMD greater
than 32-bit.

> I'll admit, I've certainly been entertaining some interest in the Atom
> recently for either use-case I had above... but if they don't have the
> ability to play back HD streams, they won't cover the HTPC market... and
> they sound a bit too power-hungry for the car PC market (which is contrary
> to what I've understood until reading your blog).

Yes.  Intel has to address the support logic for Atom before it becomes
a commodity, embedded PC.  Unless, of course, you use just the Atom CPU
with proprietary, local bus interconnections, which removes the
commodity, but currently power-hungry, north-southbridge.

Remember, Atom is ultra-simplistic in design.  It is a _fraction_ of the
die size of a Core 2 processor.


-- 
Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
-------------------------------------------------------------
           Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution


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