Intel should have made something better

That's the main point and the reason why I keep talking about the A110 which I consider a step backward.  I never have claimed -neither James and Kevin- to be a hardware expert or to know more than anyone about processors. This is why a comment like this is really appreciated.

It has been reported that the 915 chipset apparently supported Aero in MS Vista Beta's, however the drivers are not recognized by Microsoft as Aero capable in the final version. The number of computers with the Intel 915 chipset was very large, and all of sudden it became obsolete, generating in some cases an artificial demand for the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo computers with the newer 945 that fully supports Aero.

At some point it become obvious that the VIA mobile chips are very power efficient and require less space, making them ideal for UMPC's. The OQO 02 is much smaller than the Sony UX or Fujitsu U1010. The VIA based Q1B has better battery runtime than the Q1 and Q1P. Intel's response was the A110, basically the same 90nm Celeron M 900 MHz (353) found in the Q1, with 100 MHz lower maximal core frequency and SpeedStep technology.

I'm not 100% sure, but there is evidence that the "new" A110 consumes less most of all because it's lower clocked, it's not an advance. I mean, Intel should have used the 65nm process as the base for the new chip, there was no reason to use 90nm. Having a smaller core it would have more potential to consume less. Also the the new chip should have SSE3/VT micro instructions, perhaps AMD64 too. Very soon there will be some problems to address more than 2GB RAM with 32 bits technology, also 64 bits OS and applications should run faster.

I personally find A110 based Q1 Ultra acceptable, I have said before that the 353 Celeron M had enough performance for an UMPC. Also it's great that they have added SpeedStep. But, being a new processor, Intel should have made something better than the older chip. Not only focus on consumption.

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jkOnTheRun: Did Intel pull a fast one with the A1xx processors?

I know that many already think that I'm constantly attacking Intel's A110 up to the point that I'm mentally sick. But it seems to me that I'm not the only one, check this post from James Kendrik: 

That's not a good thing for Intel as devices have starting appearing using the current A1xx processors.  There are currently two flavors of the A-series that run at 600 MHz and 800 MHz.  You would think that using slower processors would be a boon to battery life but I am the first to admit I am disappointed in the performance of these new processors.

The A110 brings a better battery life, in the old Pentium M the maximum you could have got was around 2.5 hours, with the A110 I have seen reports of more than 3 hours. But as you can see, we are talking about 30 to 45 minutes more of battery life.

But there are many factors than need to be analyzed. For example, the 945 Graphic Chipset is not really a lot better than the 915 and you have it running at 1024x600 while the old devices using the 915 were using 800x480. So what ever that chipset added in performance to the new generation is gone because of this higher resolution. So from the point of view of graphics both generations are almost at the same level. Taking this in consideration what's left? Pure processor power and in this case both processors have a common architecture and you have the A110 running at 200 MHz less than the Pentium M used in the old generation. So... there is nothing weird in getting around 20 to 15 % less performance.

In my opinion, Intel did a good job making a processor that could mimic current VIA processors in the market. That was the goal. To have a processor that could give the same battery life and bring about the same performance than current C7 from VIA. And they did a good job on that. You have to look around and read the news of about 6 months ago. You had news about HTC putting a VIA processor in the Shift, you had news about the OQO 02 using a VIA processor, you had news about the Mediom UMPC using a VIA processor. So under that pressure the only logical and fast move was to take a Pentium M and modified a little bit decreasing performance up to the same level than those VIAs and getting the same battery life. Keep in mind that there were two big complains from the press about the 1st Generation: Battery Life and the absence of Keyboards. And this Second generation tried to address both "issues".

Another factor that you have to take in consideration is the OS. This second generation was released when Vista was released and this coincidence had bad consequences. Vista is not the best OS neither for the A110 or the VIA processor. And there are the benchmarks to prove it. Those who installed XP in these machines have a lot better performance. To have Vista running in any of the first generation or second generation machine running at a descent performance you have to spend hours of digging in the OS configuration to set it right. And that's what OEM have failed to do. They just installed the OS and added their crapware to make things worse.

So as results of all these facts all you get is a second generation that disappoint many because of it poor performance.  Like James says in his post, if you look around every single review about the devices using the A110 say the same thing: they are slow.

That's my opinion. 

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Update on the 915 Graphics WDDM Vista Driver Issue

Apparently, there still some  hope in getting Aero running in the first generation of Intel based UMPCs according to this post of Josh Bancroft:

Since I posted a comment in one of the previous discussions about the 915 Graphics Vista driver issue, that I was going to talk to the graphics group about the possibility of releasing an open source and/or "beta" unofficial WDDM driver, to let you at least try to get Aero Glass, Movie Maker, and DVD Maker working in Windows Vista, you've been coming here every day to see/ask if there's been any progress. So here's an update:

I haven't talked to the graphics group yet, because I'm trying to identify the right people to talk to. That's hard in such a big company (Intel has almost 100,000 employees, and I don't work directly with anyone in the Graphics group). But I'm going to find someone, eventually.

To me, the fact or possibility of having a new driver coming soon capable of running Aero is a good news. Will I use Aero? I doubt it. All depends on the impact of it on my performance.

Technorati Tags: Vista, Aero, 915