Here is how I got into the word Crappy. Few weeks ago I posted a poll in this site and more than 70 people voted.
64% of them voted for a better performance. That's the group where I'm, 36% voted for better battery life, that's where my brother Steve is.
In the way I see current UMPC market, we have in the latest generation UMPCs using the A110 and A100 Intel processors, we have UMPCs using the latest C7 from VIA and we have if we still have any, Steve can correct me because he is keeping a wonderful table with all UMPCs in the market, a very small group using AMD processors. If you check, it seems to me that in this second round there are more UMPC using the VIA C7 processor than in the first round. And I believe that Intel felt this pressure. And what happened, using Chippy's words, Intel "optimized" a Pentium M processor, locking the speed at 600 or 800 MHz, decreasing the cache size, and including some minor "new" features. Using my own words, it took a C7 processor, checked the performance of it and configured the Pentium M to match that performance. The result, a processor with almost the same performance and battery life.
And what was the cost? Well for 64% of the UMPC owners that means less performance, for 36% means more battery life.
What I was expecting from Intel, well I was expecting a processor with the same performance we had in the Pentium M and Celeron M processors used in the first generation at least and with the same battery life we see in current VIA processors. That would be what I would call a step forward. But that did not happen, that's way to me this Intel's move is a step backward.
Well, probably I'm being to hard with Intel. They just wanted to stay in the competition with VIA.
Note: the A110 and A100 use a new graphic chip, but I have not seen a good comparison with the latest Graphic chip used in the C7 from VIA. It seems to me that probably the Intel's one is a little bit better than VIA's, but I have not confirmed this yet. If any of you, more into this hardware world have more details or can compare both graphic chips for me I really will appreciate this.
Hi Ctitanic.
ReplyDeleteYes. The A110/A100 is a step backwards in performance. Its a shame really. If battery tech had advanced just 10% in the last year i think we'd be seeing different things now but unfortunatly, battery tech is still where it was two, three, maybe more years ago.
Hopefuly next year you will get your higher-performance Intel chip but I have the feeling that they might concentrate on the low end of the market where they see 1Ghz as the high-end in performance.
Cheers!
Steve
100% agree with you!
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