Intel Atom Performance Comparison

Even since Intel released its Silverthorne project as the Atom, I have been salivating at finally picking up a small, cool, light desktop that is a cheap and versatile performer. Why do I need a power-guzzling Core 2 Duo when everyday tasks don’t need something more powerful than a Pentium III? I know because I have run XP on a 866 MHz P3 and thought the experience sufficient for the internet, music, office, and basic 4+ year old games(AOE2, Starcraft, Rise of Nations, Rome Total War). Since we passed the gigahertz threshold, I’ve been asking why the regular PC user needs anything more powerful? Sure, if you’re a gamer or a video ripping fanatic, you’ll need all the power you can get, but really for basic office tasks, is the Atom up to the task?

Since I do not own an Atom, I thought that the best way to do a comparison is to find which old CPU is the most comparable to the Atom. In terms of transistor count, the Athlon XP at 37.5 million and Willamette P4 at 42 million were good initial guesses for appropriate counterparts to the Atom, standing at 47 million. Benchmarks were few and far between, but I did dig up the following:

Tomshardware says that the Atom with HT passes PCMark05 with a score of 1478. Not bad. How does the Athlon XP compare? Well, the Athlon XP 1800+ with a score of 1497 came close. On the Intel side, the Celeron (Willamette edition) 2 GHz scoring 1449 was the closest comparison.

The verdict? Having owned an Athlon XP 1800+ and having played with a friend’s P4 @ 2 GHz, I can confidently say that all users with basic requirements (office, internet, email, music, basic video playback, and light gaming) can get by fine with an Atom CPU. Watch out, Intel. Don’t be caught cannibalizing your own products!

Now I am interested in whether the Atom is capable of playing 1080p x264 video, which is typical of most anime fansub encodes these days. If it can handle that, I’m sold on selling off my existing desktops and replacing them with Atom-based machines.

gcc vs icc

As someone who’s always interested in the performance of software, I haven’t found many comparisons or benchmarks of compilers. Of particular interest to me are optimizations possible when using SIMD instruction sets.

Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that someone had already done a benchmark by comparing execution times of x264 and oggenc after compiling with different compilers.

Looks like gcc has improved in 4.3, but it still has a long way to go to match icc’s brute speed. This is of particular use in anime fansubbing, where every second counts .

Shows That Made Me Cry

Full Moon wo Sagashite
Kimi ga Nozomu Eien
Now and Then, Here and There
Hoshi no Koe

and now, Desperate Housewives, whose last episode of the first season has the dubious distinction of having made me laugh and cry at the same time. Oh the pain!

Boundless Creativity

It’s on times such as these that I feel a certain sisterly kinship with Miyazawa.

People like you… you’re so amazing. You’re all aspiring writers, directors of the school play, or med school acceptants. You all already have real skills and love for something. All I can do is study well. All I can do is struggle to clutch fading dreams at daybreak.

Unlike Vanity Spared, I don’t have much aptitude in putting my thoughts and feelings into words.

Oh, on a totally unrelated note, Michigan primaries are on. Here’s a good article.

First Day

Hmm… Classes began today. They’re not very exciting so far and it looks like they shouldn’t be problematic. Rather, I was more productive in other areas. For example, there was a very nice glue job on my broken headphones (after 2 days). It’s now a bit more loosely fitting and barely covers my ears but at least it isn’t completely useless.

Arch Linux is just like Gentoo. There’s a long standing joke about Gentoo being so efficient with your computing resources that it saves time but you always want a faster machine to compile things quicker. Arch’s downside is that it saves me time and is so light/quick in regular use but wastes my time in setting it up. The default install did not boot, and I had to do many tweaks to get things like the sound system, auto eject, auto mount, printing, samba, networking, and graphics to work. It’s probably more of a hassle than it’s worth, but after it’s nice and homey, I don’t plan on moving to another distro on my desktop. Arch is on a rolling update, so I can always stay up to date, and its efficiency makes my 5 year old desktop feel like a Conroe. =)

Virtualdub works! Whatever one says about avidemux, Virtualdub is where it is at for video processing. After a few tweaks, I got it to work under wine. Using it with a virtual machine is probably more trouble than it’s worth with all the ram requirements. XviD also worked nicely. I did some tests with Kat’s copies of Initial D that were scattered on my table and the encoding job ran smoothly, quickly, and correctly. Next stop is getting Avisynth to work under wine. With sysreset already running, it’s just a matter of time.

Apparently, I have bipolar disorder

Ack! Ajax is the worst. My work at the Freeling Lab is finally paying some dividends though. We’re working on a really cool genomic database and comparison tool that can be used to find synteny between organisms as distinct as Arabidopsis and humans.

This is cool stuff! The only problem is that the API is a pain to learn. Ajax is impossible to debug. It also has such strict syntaxes and requirements but never throws any error. It just gives a 500 Server Error.

With that said, it looks like I’ll be quite busy this winter break. I just decided to stay here and not go home. It seems that I am very unproductive at home and completely lose my focus. What Wayne said of my bipolar disorder may also come into play here. I become a lazy bum after crossing the door of my home.

Plan for winter:
Wake up nice and early
Tennis
Shower
Breakfast
Webcast
Lunch
Basketball
Reading
Dinner
Coding/Research
Writing
Weight Room
Sleep

Yea, I’m sure I’ll get half of that done. If only I had Meicheng’s dedication. *sigh*

On the bright side, I am pretty set for this summer. Working for the Chair of the Dept of Infections Diseases doesn’t sound bad, eh? Not bad at all I’d say. If only that were the case for next semester.

Early plans:
CSBA IT Chair
Bio UGSI
Chem Tutor
Daily Cal Columnist
Fansubbing (I swear I have to get back into this sometime, ugh!)
Research
Open Source Development

Yea… I probably will get 2 of those done, and it won’t be fansubbing. >< If only I had… wait, I already said that. Never mind.

Yea, I have that bipolar thingie.

Emerson was right

I’ve spent far too much time these months with “the whore,” as I’ve taken to calling my computer. This is what it currently looks like: Desktop
As you can probably tell, I’m a huge fan of the Final Fantasy stories. Aeris is probably one of the best female leads ever created. She has a pure soul and a good heart and genuinely cares about her friends. She is not afraid to speak her thoughts but is not brash and abrasive. When you meet her, she carries a smile and is cheerful, which is what makes her so beautiful. Beauty if determined more often by one’s attitude rather than pure physical look (personal opinion). However, if you catch her alone in a quiet moment, a sad look can cross her face at times. Obviously, this is from the traumatic experiences of her early childhood and the knowledge that she is the last of her kind. With all that weight resting on this little one’s shoulders, it is amazing that she still marches onwards to her destiny. What a strength of will. I don’t know if my predilection for sad girls developed because of some unknown magic Aeris worked on me.

A lot has happened since my last post. A certain memorable event involved someone trying to steal my umbrella (which was broken btw) in Cory Hall. I had entered the bathroom and left my umbrella on top of a paper towel dispenser. Someone coming out of the bathroom took it and promptly ran out. I heard him run and went to check and saw that my umbrella was gone. I dashed after him and, thanks to all those weeks of high school PE, caught him before he could run out of the building. When I confronted him, he merely replied, “Oh, this was yours?” What was he thinking? I let him off easy. But then again, he was an Indian guy twice my height.

Finally I can stop Chen from badgering me about finding a place. Thanks to some business skills, I managed to secure an apartment in the same building that we had previously failed to obtain. Chinese skills certainly came in handy, as the landowner later told us that she chose us over another group of girls because I spoke Chinese and seemed like a nice guy. \o/ Wayne called me a cunning and manipulative businessman. Yang also impressed us with some timely humour that definitely balanced well with a more professional and reserved approach from the rest of us. Definitely play to your strength. Oh, currently there are three girls living in our apt. In the summer, one of them will move out, but Chen+Yang can’t move in there for summer school because one of the girls is still living there. Apparently, her bf will throw a fit if he found out she was living with other guys. Come on, how harmless can Chen+Yang be? This cracked me up. It was certainly different from a certain other person I know who has no qualms about these things ^_^.

So, now it’s finals week. It’s the time of gloom and doom and lowered heads and sad faces. However, make sure to keep up your spirits, everyone. Go out and run. Get plenty of sleep. I used this week to repay the sleep bank. Those few all-nighters definitely drained my reserves. To those of you who couldn’t find me online, I was very busy trying to stay afloat. At this rate, I might not even make it into grad school. =(

I’ve tried to keep this post relatively free of my thoughts and focus on what’s been happening. I’ve found that I could create some controversy with some posts here, so I’ll try to avoid that in the future. However, here’s a little tidbit: Just as the leaf falls and the flower petal flutters to the ground, so must all things come to an end. Whether they be in harmony or entropy I cannot say. =) Cryptic enough?

“…shed a teardrop each time a leaf falls.”

Hmm… Listening to Maaya’s older songs made me nostalgic… for a lot of things. First, when I lived in Glasgow, the flats were structured so that rows of neat houses would conceal the back yards. There, there was a huge yard separated by steel fences marking the boundaries for each property. There was one boy that I used to play soccer with every day after school.

Usually, when I walked back the three short blocks from my Catholic school to my home, I woud stop on the way at the local shop and buy a copy of a general knowledge magazine. This was back when those collect-the-whole-series weekly thing was all the rage. I still remember the name: Tree of Knowledge. Anyways, after getting home, I would run to the back yard and play soccer with this guy (forgot his name though =(). I also remember dragging my mom to the local park to play with me =).

Again, it’s kinda sad how little time I have to do everything I want. I was agonizing over how to manage my schedule so that all my courses and majors fit into an acceptable time range. *sigh* 2 or 3 majors? 3 or 4 years? What will I be doing after I graduate? I don’t even know. Let’s just see where this internship this summer takes me.

An interesting but random thought: I’ve always seemed to be drawn to European people rather than anyone else. I remember this one time in tennis class. I played against a Polish girl and after when we walked back, we laughed about how there were no Catholics in school and how everyone thought she was Russian. Ah, the things that me and my euro buddies still talk about even now.