Monday, October 19th 2009
Acer Aspire Revo Goes Windows 7, Dual Core
Acer's flagship nettop, the Aspire Revo, received a specs update with the company embracing Windows 7 Home Premium as the operating system the unit ships with. As part of the latest press release where Acer unveiled AspireRevo R3610-U9012 to the US market, Acer detailed a list of hardware updates alongside changing the operating system. It includes WiFi 802.11b/g/n, 2 GB of DDR2 memory (the older version had 1 GB), and dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor. Standard specifications include NVIDIA ION platform technology, which integrates NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, a HDMI port, six USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, gigabit Ethernet, 160 GB of storage, media card reader, and wireless keyboard and mouse. The new AspireRevo R3610-U9012 sells for $330 in the US.
22 Comments on Acer Aspire Revo Goes Windows 7, Dual Core
It's great the Atom is taking off... but it is time Intel did a minor upgrade/revision on the 330. The original single core Atom 230 went to 270 and now 280 and also has the low power Z derivatives.
A similar update is needed for the 330. A "380"/"390" to run on a 667 or 800 FSB rather than 533, and clocked at 2.0Ghz, not 1.6Ghz.
This might sound like small improvements, but I think it will make a big difference. The regular 330 is just short of being a good performer. It lags too often in windows based activities, and for crunch power, does not yet beat a standard office P4. (Yes, it is lower power, but no, users will "feel the downgrade". I did.)
Get another 30%+ performance out of the 330 and Intel would have a much more convicing product line. Companies will swap out older hardware for lower power... even at the same performance level. But they WONT swap out the hardware if it also means a downgrade in performance. :pimp:
But the Atom 330 is far better than you think. It can play 1080p, which is the main price-point trait, while my Pentium 4 OC @ 3.6Ghz can barely play 720p. I don't notice any lag, as well, like I did with the N270. And in regards to your question, it's because they already have something to compete at the assumed Atom '380' price level. One day, there will be such a processor, but in my opinion, it will not be worth upgrading to.
I hope by the time they go Quad, it will be on a different architecture. It's not about power now; the Atom takes almost none.
There is plenty of room for improvement of the Atom 330 before it starts to cannabalise Core 2 products. Check the comparison of an Atom 330 vs. a Q6600. The Q6600 is 5-10x as fast as the 330. A 30-50% improvement of 330 will not impact Intels higher brand products, but WILL make a more convincing upgrade and decommission option for older P4 systems.
Check here for some benchmark results (from another thread, the green row is a netbook, not the 330):
My P4's seem to outperform yours, or at least my P4's are better than my 330s. ;)
What happened to the VIA nano anyway? It's superior to Atom from what I saw, including being 1080p capable, but it seems to have disappeared from the radar :(
Nano & ION, and/or a little more reasonably priced, and I'm sold.
Single core should be Atom 1xx
Dual core should be Atom 2xx
And there should be an Atom 3xx ... triple core.
And they should drop the Z 5xx naming convention. How inconsistent. Call it the Atom Z1xx or Atom 1xxL
Oh, let's not start talking about i5, i7 LOL!
The marketing/brand management team need a royal kick up the axx
I wonder why the "downgrade" with the $ version with Win 7 edition?
If a CPU can run 1080p, as in 2 million pixels of video, there is no way it will lag with an explorer window. Since when are two programs run on the same core? Especially with Windows 7, that has been nullified. I've been using Windows 7 for over half a year.
Now, those benchmarks are all nice and good, but if you still have your P4(s), I implore you to give it a real-world test against an A330, if you have one. And I have to doubt whether yours outperform mine. Mine have been comfortably heating up my room for years now ;) Overclocked Netburst.. the horror.
I do, and I say it beats P4 by a mile when it comes to multi-threaded applications.
Also, are you seriously comparing the Q6600 to the Atom 330? How do you get to 5-10x better when we're talking about something that takes up the assumed price of the Atom '380'? Think about it again.
Woah, this is getting a little out of hand. The Atom 330 is not in ANY way here to compete with Core 2 Duo OR even in the slightest bit be a worthwhile and commercially straightforward upgrade potential to Pentium 4. Not only is Pentium 4 obsolete in terms of market pricing, when you can get any 'Pentium Dual-Core' brand CPU for 30$ and have it feast upon it's succulent power consumption, but it has been fazed out years ago. Barely anyone has a Pentium 4 and those that do are and should upgrade to Core 2 Duo. The Atom series is meant for a niche or at least specialized segment of the computer industry. No one is going to upgrade from a Pentium 4 to an Atom 330, simply put. A Pentium 4 takes 150 watts and reaches 60C on idle. An Atom 330 takes 8 watts and the only boards I've found that come with it pre-assembled don't allow overclocking of any kind, much to my dismay. Unless of course you're talking about the laptop segment, in which you can get an old Turion that will eat alive a Pentium M. And now taking its place, the Atom series. A godsend, truly.
As far as I can see, from also having a Q6600, is this. The Atom 330 can handle a 8-10Mbps 1080p video, without ION. The Q6600, can handle about two 8-10Mbps 1080p videos at stock and three when OC to 3.2-3.6Ghz.
So, in short, I don't trust that benchmark, I don't trust benchmarks when it comes to my actual experience with a CPU, and you should trust me.
The only thing I want to see now is an N330.
one movie with hardware accel is a lot easier on the system than 3-4 windows and web browsers with flash animation.i've only tested against the 1.6Ghz single core model, and it was terrible :( we had to OC it and use coreAVC to get 720p anime to play, and that required disabling deblocking.its hard to trust benchmarks, when the video in use can change them so much. i've got 720p files that bring some PC's to their knees, and they play (some/most) 1080p files fine - its all about how they were encoded (bitrate, reference frames, etc)
i know a 3800+ dual core (939) with 1GB ram and a 128MB video card can take on 1080P files fine, with a good codec behind it (coreAVC). with hardware accel, its got room to spare.
I'm in complete agreeance that a new atom needs to come out, once its around 2GHz they'll be able to handle 95% of H264 content out there in software mode, without needing to rely on nvidias (sometimes dodgy) hardware acceleration that requires a paid for third party program to work.
ION is great, but I wanted to build mine myself, and at the time, ION wasn't sold in motherboard-only packages. I do regret it, in a way, but now I have the knowledge to tell you what Atom 330 can really do.. as in, without any aid.
Also, I don't know much about hardware acceleration on Netbooks. Only way I can get that on my Q6600 PC, is by using my HD-DVD/Blu-ray player.Considering both are multi-threaded, you can make the same assumption in regards to a Quad-core Atom being better than the Atom 330. Sure, the hardware acceleration feature is nice, but this is about what the Atom can do without it. I say it can run the video and the flash animations.. although not at the same time, which can be slightly annoying if you're used to a Q6600.Oh yes, I know :(
I could get a few 720p files to run on the N270, but some would lag. Any amount of lag, and the video became un-watchable. Luckily, the A-330 doesn't have that problem.. which is why I bought it.
Btw, any OC method you can give me would be awesome. Heck, I'd get two of my Deltas on that little cooler and post some records. That, or I'll try some DICE.To be honest with you, I have been seeing (and liking) higher bitrate 1080p video files lately.. which I guess the A-330 might slightly lag with. But, I stand by my positive protest - the Atom 330 can run 1080p. Anything added to it would only be for safety margins.. and I think that's the point of this; I like to take things to the edge :D
what I'd really like to see evolve in Atom also is parallelism...
Say 3 core-6 thread atom @ ~2.4ghz and 32nm would rock the low power kazbar.
1./ There are MILLIONS of P4's still in operation around the world today in nearly every single office you walk into. In fact, the majority of businesses have PC over 2 years old, and even their servers still on P4s. It is the investment cycle. Companies DO NOT buy the latest and greatest every year and throw away all last year's machines.
2./ If companies SWAPPED their P4 systems for Atom systems, they would pay for themselves pretty quickly in terms of power savings... BUT no company in their right mind would downgrade their PC's performance wise. Power savings? A few dollars per month. Productivity loses? Hundreds of dollars. No one will "upgrade" from a P4 to an Atom while the Atom is still unable to compete in performance terms with the machines that are to be upgraded.
3./ I have 3 Atom 330 systems, one Atom N280, 4 P4 systems, a P3-S system, 2 Q6600 systems, and 1 Xeon 2xE5420 system. I know what I'm talking about, and those benchmarks shown above are REAL WORLD NUMBERS conducted on the same OS, in my office. So STOP denying those numbers
4./ An Atom 330 CANNOT handle 1080p PERIOD. The ION chipset can.
5./ Read my previous posts again and again until the message finally gets through: there is plenty of scope for intel to improve the performance of the Atom before it gets anywhere near cannabilising their higher performance processor sales. The Q6600 is 5-10x the performance of the Atom 330. That means Intel can double the performance of the Atom 330 and it still will not interfere with sales of Core 2 Duo/Quad based processors
:banghead:
Which would match this needlessly angry and self-aggrandizing rant inspired by the fact that you know everything.
You disappoint me.. because I thought you were better. But maybe I'm more daunting than I think. In any case, I thought we were still friends.
But friendships can end, while the beautiful world of computer hardware will always be here.
That is my only solace in trying to, and for the last time, complete this debate.That is very true. I worked in 7 different bases during my time in the Israeli army, as an Administrator, and most of what I saw, fixed and replaced were Pentium 4-based machines. Some of them were older 1.4Ghz rigs and some were Dell 3.0Ghz, which came in slightly shinier dark blue cases. The reason they still used Pentium 4, as far as most of the higher ranking officers told me behind closed doors, was that it can't run anything that a soldier shouldn't be doing. Thus, there was no reason to ever replace them. The people who told me this usually had much better and more expensive rigs. My experience at my father's company, ever since I was little was the same, and every computer-related job I've donated my time too was thus - there is no reason to ever upgrade unless the machine literally dies.I don't know where you got this absolutely ridiculous idea.
The upgrade route upwards from Pentium 4 goes no where near Atom.
I'll say it again - Atom is a specialized CPU. It is and will be utilized by niche markets.
If companies wanted to upgrade their Pentium 4 - which they do not - they would get Core 2 Duo. Any Conroe core takes less power than Netburst, and there have been low-power varieties for years now. An E4300 would use far less power than Pentium 4 and run it into the downgrade. And that's even still in the 65nm process. I've seen and helped companies upgrade specific computers to Pentium Dual-Core since a year ago. Now, I'm guessing every high-enough ranking manager has his own low-TDP 45nm-based Dual-Core.
And to be perfectly honest, I don't know many companies that care about saving a few dollars a month on power. They're all used to Netburst.. anything below is usually amazing to them.. or rather it would be, if they cared. In the military, they honestly didn't. Every sector only had to worry about productivity. They could host overclocking contests on the front area of the base and as long as they met demands, no one wold care. Some companies I've seen are the same. In regards of smaller companies that perhaps just began their life? I'd simply love to see them switching from Pentium 4 to Atom 330.I'll work up.
I have 1 Atom 330 system (because it's my little pet and I luves it), one Atom N270-based ASUS 1000HA netbook, my precious Pentium 3 667Mhz from my early days, 2 P4 systems (the rest I didn't build myself), 2 Conroe E2200 and E4300, 2 Wolfsdale E5300 and E7300, and 1 Q6600.
I listen to my CPU's, I look at them, I understand them. As cheesy as that sounds, it allows me to claim that benchmarks don't mean much to me, as they are not rarely false at depicting real-world performance.
I know for a fact what I say. I can't make a graph about it.. but the same can be said about most great types of knowledge. I can make a video with my HD camcorder, but even that wouldn't do it justice. You just have to see for yourself.
And maybe, just maybe, it has some subjective elements to it. So neither of us are right.Do you have an Atom 330 without ION? I do. And I can prove that it runs 1080p.
It's the only reason I bought the damn thing, so if it couldn't, you'd think I would have sent it back already, or have been really pissed off.You mean brainwash myself with lies? NE-VER! (homage to GiantBomb)
Scope.. which has already been filled by the.. other CPU's Intel sometimes released when they can pause for a second and take their eyes off of their glorious Q6600.
This has been enjoyable. I have nothing to hold against you.
:respect:
Having a, say, ~15w CPU beating an E5300.
But then we'll have 32nm CPU's which will be as good, comparatively to Atom as the current 45nm line.
So, my entire argument is that Atom becoming more powerful is a paradox, since the only thing it's useful for is low power, and when it becomes powerful ENOUGH (my thesis is that it's when it can run 1080p video), there is no reason to keep making it take more power (as in, become more powerful). Yes, I know.
I'm rooting for an 8-core, 16-thread 22nm Atom that can run 2160p video.. in 2012. Until then, Com-cutey is the only thing I need.. beside a stable love life and an overall positive way of being.