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Written by Ben Hall
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Thursday, 14 August 2008 |
As many of you have probably seen, there have been a lot of reviews of VIA’s new Nano processor vs. Intel’s Atom processor cropping up in the news lately. With both processors having low power as one of the major selling points, there’s been a lot of interest in both the media and public as to how the two new CPUs would stack up against one another.
If you’ve been following the coverage, you would know that in terms of performance, the VIA Nano came out on top by quite a margin. Here are links to a few of the articles if you’re interested in the finer details:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/757/1/
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15204
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars
In terms of straight out power consumption, most sites gave a slight edge to the Atom platform (although the VIA Nano still held a significant performance per watt advantage), but one site in particular, PC Perspective, had a very interesting take on the power draw issue.
PC Perspective decided to use the Watts Up power meter to see how power consumption looked over time when comparing the VIA Nano and Intel Atom processors. In the graph below, the processors were set an MP3 encoding task. The Atom had the edge in power draw, but the Nano was definitely faster to complete the task.
To analyze the results, the reviewer worked out just how much energy each platform took to complete then encoding. the VIA Nano processor used a total of 37,323 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy while the Intel Atom processor used 38,290 watt-seconds (Joules) of energy. Not much of a difference, but at the end of the day the VIA Nano was able to perform tasks faster (by as much as 30% in some cases) while still using less total energy than Intel's Atom.
Certainly a new and interesting way to look at device power consumption. |
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