| | By Examiner Staff @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:24 AM
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| | A number of reviews conducted by hardware sites conclude that Intel's cheap-as-chips 'Atom' processor doesn't bear scrutiny against Via's recently announced Nano chip.
Hardware sites including HardOCP, Hot Hardware, Ars Technica and others compared systems running the two processors and published benchmarks suggesting the Atom 230 doesn't really make the grade.
Ars Technica suggested Via's Nano is a 'wunderkind', while HardOCP said that it didn't expect the Intel Atom 'to take such an overall beating'. Hot said the Nano outperformed the Atom by a factor of 15%-20%.
Joel Hruska at Ars reckons that the Nano is 'the most compelling CPU the company has every launched' and its MiniITX mobo has features which Intel can't match. He reckons Intel has hamstrung support for the Atom because it's afraid that it might cannibalize sales of its cut down Celeron chip. The bigger question is whether these small systems are going to set the world alight - the jury is still out on that, as Intel's Sean Maloney admitted to the Examiner earlier this year.
It's early days for the Via Nano yet - the chip is still sampling - while the Atom 230 is available in a number of systems. X
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