It has an Intel's Atom CPU running at 1.6 GHz (slowing down to 800 MHz in power-save mode) and despite the few unfortunate things about it and its associated platform (most important for me - the power-hungry northbridge chip), it's more than good enough.
I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on it and there are a few things that needed manual tweaking:
- Sound support needed alsamixer to enable full volume (the "maximum" value is too quiet by default)
- Wireless network needs updated drivers (I'm still not sure the new drivers work, though)
- /etc/fstab entry for the nonexistent CD drive needed to be nuked as it's clashing with USB drives (suprisingly, iso9660 isn't exactly popular on flash drives...)
- I haven't yet tried the SD card reader
The performance is more than adequate. It can run all the Linux compiz gadget like wobbly windows, the workplaces cube, etc. without problems. Playing videos is very uneventful - it just works. I did a quick comparison between my old laptop with Pentium M @ 1.5 GHz (DDR 333 memory) and this Atom @ 1.6 GHz (DDR2 533 memory) based new laptop using ubench and bc. Unfortunatly my old laptop still has FreeBSD 7 on it so the results are only approximately comparable:
- Pentium M @ 1.5 GHz :
- Ubench CPU Score: 88,600
- Ubench Memory Score: 54,500
- bc 3^1000000 time: 31.8 s
- Atom @ 1.6 GHz:
- Ubench CPU Score: 77,900
- Ubench Memory Score: 128,700
- bc 3^1000000 time: 39.4 s
I don't know why the big difference in Ubench memory score - it might be an artefact of the benchmark running on different OS-es (the difference in hardware doesn't begin to explain it) but from daily usage the CPU score seems very reliable - it seems only a bit slower than the 1.5 GHz Pentium M but offsets it with other strengths (hyperthreading, better video, memory performance). Atom is a hyperthreaded CPU, but in contrast to the early Pentium 4 HTT, this implementation actually seems useful. There's a 25% -30% increase in SMP-based benchmark (in this case, 7-zip running on WinXP) versus the single-CPU variant.
If it seems weird that a new 1.6 GHz CPU is slower than a 1.5 GHz CPU several years old, it's because Atom is a completely new design which sacrifices many high-end CPU features for power consuption and (especially) lower manufacturing costs. Specifically, the internal design is massively simplified: Atom is only slightly "superscalar", able to have only two instructions in processing (similar to the Pentium from 1993) and it doesn't have any support for out of order execution (again, like the old Pentium). On the other hand, Atom has modern instruction sets (SSSE3 but not x64), support for modern memory and hyperthreading. I've seen the combination of in-order execution and hyperthreading before - it's what Sun's Niagara platform (UltraSPARC T1) uses to deliver 64 hardware threads ("hyperthreaded CPUs") on a single CPU. Atom is a really weird CPU and it's surprising that it comes from Intel, known for being rather heavy-handed in bloating the hardware with features.
Why am I not running FreeBSD on it? I know that SD and audio won't work, wireless has a good chance of working, but mostly it's because Ubuntu is very low-maintenance OS and in this case it's what I need.
#1 CPU slow down blows
the CPU cutting down to 800MHz is too slow I realize it's there to save power however it is painful to use when running this low, infact my asus eee 701 runs 1000x better. Also it should be noted that the CPU also goes into 800MHz while plugged in...pointless as it doesn't need to save power from the wall. Overall if you're looking for a netbook go with Asus, even lower clock speeds will be much faster.