To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Did you read what I wrote about ValleyView having a gen7 GPU that is totally Intel's (no PowerVR there)?
Did you read what I wrote about ValleyView being the first out-of-order execution Atom?
The answer to both questions seems to be "no".
Basically, what you wrote is a rant that is only possible because you ignored the two main points about ValleyView - the CPU is out-of-order (eliminating the weakness that is the in-order-ness of the current Atoms), and the GPU has a fully featured open-source driver (check the changelogs of the recent kernels, you'll find plenty of ValleyView commits in there).
The AMD machines you mention are missing two quite big things in the open-source driver, because AMD has *not* released specs for them - power management and hardware video decode. ValleyView will provide both. And that is why I want one.
And trust me, I'm very aware of the limitations of the current Atoms. The machine I'm typing this comment on is Diamondville (Atom N270 CPU, GMA950 GPU).
Edited 2012-09-20 23:16 UTC
Did you read what I wrote about ValleyView having a gen7 GPU that is totally Intel's (no PowerVR there)?
Did you read what I wrote about ValleyView being the first out-of-order execution Atom?
The answer to both questions seems to be "no".
"
The Intel GPUs even Gen7 leave a lot to be desired (their GPUs still suck).
The AMD SoC's you can buy now. The Intel SoC's you cannot and won't be able to for upwards of a year from now.
Check out OpenELEC, seems to be working just fine. i built a couple of E350s and everything played nice and smooth in both 720 and 1080, no hassle. And I'm sorry but Intel GPUs still sucketh, they just aren't very good and are still several generations behind what Nvidia and AMD have coming out.
Finally you still ignored the elephant in the room which is Intel STILL cripples the chips, no support for decent amounts of RAM (last specs I saw was still limited to 2gb, AMD has minimum 4Gb and most support 8Gb) and things like GPU turbo again missing.
So if you wanna pay more for a weaker hamstringed chip that is your business, but I have NO doubt that the Bobcat II is gonna curbstomp it. Oh and you can buy Bobcat one NOW at just $125 with a nice case and PSU, look at the Intel offerings, they charge more for less.





Member since:
2007-11-11
Why would you want Atom after Intel has kept going with PowerVR? For low power X86 frankly the Bobcat is a better chip, dual out of order X86 chips with support for virtualization, unlike Intel they don't hamstring their chips on memory so you can go up to 8Gb on most models and 4gb on ALL models, usually cheaper than Atom and now that Intel has wiped out ION frankly its the only one that has a real GPU. Finally AMD has been opening their specs and docs as fast as they can and the next gen Bobcats are gonna have quad core out soon that fits into the same power envelope.
So I really don't know why you'd want an Atom, Intel cripples the chip too much trying to upsell you on a Celeron or Pentium. The bobcats have all the features of their big brothers, great performance, and you can buy an E350 in a nice HTPC case with PSU for $125 off of NewEgg. Just a better way to go if you want to run Linux IMHO. OpenELEC even has an XBMC build designed for Fusion OOTB, so you can just slap it on and go, easy peasy.