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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

I was shocked the other day the Intel discontinued Intel Atom. So if one needs a cheap SoC board, there are now only ARM like Raspberry Pi, and no cheap ($50) x84/x64 compatible boards with Windows drivers. The Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz dual core with HT) of 2008 was cheap ($50) and fast (Pentium M based). And on the high-end side there is still no 5GHz and there is little single-core improvement since 2004, since the Pentium 4 3GHz. We need more competition with x84/x64 to get lower prices and faster cores.

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What do you mean discontinued? What about the Atom that was just introduced earlier in 2016? e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138... ?

It's not an Intel Atom, but a low spec low power Celeron. The J3060 has no hyperthreading and without the boost it's as slow as the Atom 330 (which has HT). So after 8 years, there is no Atom brand anymore, and the next best option is as slow as back then and costs about the same.

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/979/Intel_Atom_330_vs_Intel...

> on the high-end side there is still no 5GHz and there is little single-core improvement since 2004, since the Pentium 4 3GHz.

This isn't true. There's easily a single thread win, clock-for-clock, of 2-3x over this period.

Single core performance comparision: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

   Intel Core i3-4370 @ 3.80GHz     2,215 pts 
   Intel Pentium 4    @ 3.80GHz       822 pts

But to make a fair comparison, one would have to throttle the memory to the speed of a 2004 memory chip. Then the CPU single core performance increase will be a lot less. Also the Pentium 4 architecture was a crossroad and Intel switched back to Pentium 3/M for Core. So a better comparision is the fastest Pentium M with a modern Core CPU.

  Intel Core i7-4760HQ @ 2.10GHz    1,922 pts
  Intel Pentium M      @ 2.10GHz      660 pts

Again, the memory speed increased a lot since then, so for a fair comparison, one would have to throttle the memory chip.

The Atom 330 vs current gen Celeron (haven't found J3060, but his bigger brother J1900):

  Intel Celeron J1900  @ 1.99GHz      530 pts   (10 W)
  Intel Celeron J3060  @ 1.60GHz        ? pts   ( 6 W)
  Intel Atom 330       @ 1.60GHz      251 pts   ( 8 W)

The performance increase of the cheapest Intel CPU hasn't increased that much since 2008, as I said.

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