Intel isn’t expected to launch its next-generation low power Atom processors until January. But we already know that the company is planning a new line of Atom chips for netbooks and a related line for low power, small form-factor desktops, or nettops. Two of the first nettop chips will be the Intel Atom D410 and D510. The folks at German site CarTFT have gotten their hands on one of each, and they were kind enough to run some benchmarks.
The results are pretty much what I would have expected, with the new chips offering slightly better CPU and GPU performance than current generation Intel Atom chips. But a machine with a current generation Intel Atom 330 dual core processor and NVIDIA ION graphics will still trounce the new processors in 3D graphics benchmarks.
You can find details of the CarTFT benchmarks at this PDF link.
via SlashGear
The big improvement over the prev-gen Atom 330 mITX board is that this is fanless, which is much preferred for mobile computers. For multimedia (video) nettops, it’s a non-factor. You still need an add-on gfx solution like the Ion, plus HDMI out.
One can obviously see the niche for netbooks. Nettops w/o good gfx capability is a much smaller niche, since its mainstream use would be for rendering video onto HDTVs. That’s why the prev-gen Intel nettops never took off, despite attractive price points.
Except the price points are still too high, and at the end of the day the requirements for graphics are continuously going up, not down, and Intel seems to REFUSE to either partner with someone who could make netops viable (nVidia), lisence a good graphics controller, or release reference designs which allow for upgrade cards… Which will continue to make them niche, almost useless products… Which is REALLY SAD because I like the concept a lot. But me liking it won’t make the facts change.