AMD Athlon 2650e & X2 3250e - Better than Atom for SFF Desktops
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption: Higher than Atom
I don’t have a zino HD here to test, but I can hook up a 780G board and Atom 330/ION board to the same PSU and to get an idea for power consumption. The directly comparable numbers are those bars in orange and green. They use the same ATX power supply, the rest use external DC bricks.
As you’d expect, the AMD system does eat more power. At idle the Athlons actually use around the same amount of power as the Atom 330 system (presumably Pine Trail would use less but I don’t have a good apples-to-apples comparison using the same PSU). Under load, AMD is more power hungry.
The dual-core Athlon X2 3250e actually shot up the most at almost 65W compared to 44.2W for the Atom setup.
From a power efficiency standpoint you’re obviously better off with Atom. It makes sense. Intel argued that you can only scale a desktop processor down so much before it’s more efficient to start with a brand new design to address a different power envelope.
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AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Pinetrail is useless for an HTPC ... There is HDMI, but you're limited to a max resolution of 1366x768. Pretty useless for anything above 720p HD.signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
I read somewhere that Ion 2 for Pinetrail is in the works...Penti - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
They can just make a mobile graphics card that sits on some of the four PCI-e lanes available, it's PCI-e 2.0 and is more then enough for a low-end graphics solution. There's no problem there. One lane (x1) for Gigabit ethernet, One lane (x1) for wireless (Mini PCI-e) leaves two lanes (x2 or 1000MB/s uni-directional) for graphics. It's enough. Easily faster then an IGP solutions. But most will probably just go with the Broadcom Crystal HD.Kobaljov - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
The Zotac created a new mini-ITX board with dual-core Pineview with HDMI (similary limited res) and 2 PCIe Mini Card and a PCIe x1 slot! Price is unknown but hopefully closer to the Intel prices than the previous Ion boards.Penti - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Sounds good, will definitively check it out. But it's still too resolution limited and a discrete chip would solve that. But you can solve that with a x1 graphic card :) Though not that cheap, I only know of HD4350. But at least you get full resolution HDMI then.essemzed - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Just looking at the picture I think something is conspicuously missing: a socket for a microphone jack beside the phone one.Being a nettop it is very likely it will be used for VOIP applications too (Skype or whatever) and I'd really like to plug my headset jacks, both phone and mike, in the same place, not one in the front and one (hopefully) in the back.
Bad design, IMHO.
Sergio
signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Ever heard of USB-attached headsets? ;-)Mic/headphone tu USB adapters exist too...
Calin - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Also, there are USB webcams with integrated audio.essemzed - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
my point was not that it is impossible to attach an headset to the box (of course it is), but that it would be impractical if you already own one of the typical kind, i.e. analog.hardwareguy - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
There's a mic jack on the back of the Zino HD, along with another headphone jack.http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...">http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...