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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Intel is aware that the Atom brand is pretty sullied. I'm surprised they haven't rebranded it. They've had some decent ones, like the C3000, but people do associate the name with underwhelming performance.

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I use an atom C2558 as a file server. It runs under 15 watts, has no fan, 32 GB of ECC memory, quad gigabit Ethernet ports and runs ESXi hosting a Debian ZFS file server.

It’s perfectly balanced. It can read and write at full gigabit speed, with ZFS encryption, and the CPU is ~90% utilized.

I’m pretty sure an intel atom cannot reach gigabit speeds with zfs encryption.

Based on?

Have you ever used one? They have hardware AES, and have had since 2013.

That's part of the confusion. The C2XXX and C3XXX aren't typical Atoms. They use the brand for an odd range of chips.

I always thought the C series should have been branded as something like Xeon E1 to indicate that they're server chips. And now Intel has changed it up again with Snow Ridge branded as E5900 instead of C4XXX.

I'm not making it up: https://gist.github.com/jeffmccune/0f381a69e0a8111c3cac88291...

WRITE: bw=184MiB/s (193MB/s), 184MiB/s-184MiB/s (193MB/s-193MB/s), io=10.8GiB (11.6GB), run=60067-60067msec

Correction from above though, it's an Atom C2758

I think it's the early versions that tarnished Atom's name.

I have an ancient Atom 330 still chugging away as my Asterisk box. It's on an old Intel Mini-ITX board, the only Intel-branded motherboard I've ever had that didn't die from capacitor plague.

It's hilarious to realize that a Raspberry Pi 4 will run circles around it. The 330 can't saturate a GbE port, and even the SSD pokes along at the 1.5 Gbps SATA speed. If I didn't have a PCI telephony card I wanted to keep, I'd replace it with a Pi.

I have a "netbook" (I mean, it is what it is) with a Celeron N4000. For email, light browsing, and watching online videos it's more than enough, and even manages to pull 10 hours of battery life, fanless and barely feels warm to the touch if "stressed" for a long while.

That celeron is a Goldmont+, which is a "hybrid" between previous Atom designs, with a few rehashed things from Skylake. Not a bad processors at all, though it lacks AVX (so SSE4.1 is the strongest SIMD it has) and absolutely crawls if you try to do anything number-crunchy on it.

N4000 at least is OOO. I'm pretty sure the 330 was the early core that was (to my understanding) more like a p5 than p6 in design, In order but with HT.

A lot of low power cheapie cpus from the era of the N4000 have similar trade offs, if it makes you feel any better. I had a 4 core AMD Jaguar based thing from that era and it was similar, except while number crunching was decent the single channel for memory bandwidth kneecaped anything that taxed the integrated video card or cpu too much.

I will still never understand that decision for Jaguar on mobile. If it was a cost concern why not bin? Or was the worry that with 2 channels it would make Bulldozer look worse than it already did? (My personal theory, based on my experience with a 2 core 3ghz dozer part...)

> It's hilarious to realize that a Raspberry Pi 4 will run circles around it.

Is it?

The Atom 330 was released in 2008 (as one of the cheapest, weakest processors, lowest power core Intel would produce at the time). The Rasp. Pi 4 was released 11 years later, on 24 June 2019.

I bet you that the Intel Atom 330 ran circles around any chip from 1997.

I am hoping Qnap will release a new NAS with new Atom. 2.5Gbps Ethernet, ZFS support from new OS.

Hopefully they update their design of NAS a bit so it doesn't look as bad.

I would be interested to know how much do these new Atom cost.

But now I need to sit down and think why Intel decide to use 10nm Super fin for Atom, a low margin product at this stage of the cycle. My guess would be yield is great, but that ignores Server Part and other 10nm roadmap.

I agree that the Atom brand has been sullied, but I've often wondered if they weren't "bad" per se but were used in the wrong kinds of products. I got the impression they were better suited for an ATM or a vending machine that Tweets or something -- but not great for a full Windows environment, even if the user is not doing anything resource heavy. Feel similarly toward Celeron. Marketing != practical use for these CPUs IMO

Yeah, they have used it all over. Including the C2XXX and C3XXX for server platforms.

I used to have an Atom based server that was used for an SSH bastion for a rack-internal IPMI/LOM network and it worked great. But that’s literally all it was used for.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a small server for a dedicated purpose. But would I have considered an Atom for anything else? No way.

Then again, I also didn’t consider anything but an Atom for this job.

For me, it's getting hard to consider anything other than Pi for these kinds of tasks. Yes, I could install an ancient, low-spec machine, but it'd use more power and be more bother.

Biggest reason this is annoying is only one onboard ethernet.

Now that you can boot a Pi from USB, I could see this point of view. I’ve had enough SDs die on me in a Pi that I wouldn’t trust an SD driven Pi for anything where I’d need to rely on it for remote access. I wish there was something in between Pi and Atom for this use case.

They're definitely more suited to headless operations, I have two old Atom netbooks and both were much better running Ubuntu Server. One of them -- one of the earlier Atoms that only had hyperthreading and originally ran Windows XP -- was a print server for several years. (Until the fan became grindy and the keyboard stopped registering input due to 24/7 operation with the lid closed)

With Windows -- either XP Home or 7 Starter -- they both barely chugged along, not to mention battery life.

> I got the impression they were better suited for an ATM or a vending machine that Tweets or something

Gambling machines too. There's a market for used small Atom based motherboards previously employed in betting and slot machines. They're often industrial grade really good quality hardware with plenty of serial ports even where not needed, and if lucky enough to find one with enough SATA ports, they also make excellent NAS boards. Linux support is usually complete since they're mostly used with that operating system. I had no surprises using one of them with BSD based Nas4Free.

In my experience they also work quite well in chromebooks.

> a vending machine that Tweets

A vending machine where you let it post sponsored content to your twitter in exchange for a "free" soda.

Among who? Not the people to whom they market these parts. People who are designing embedded systems with 24 low-power cores and integrated programmable 100gbps NICs don't care if the people on some overclocker forum don't like the Atom brand.

I think the defect which causes Atom C2000 processors to fail after 18 months comes to mind, to both businesses that bought the equipment and the equipment manufacturers that used them.

This batch of chips looks like it was designed for someone in mind that was going to buy a bunch of them. They then tossed it over the wall and said others can get it too. Probably some sort of IoT type situation where power is a concern with an occasional burst of work. Something where you are 95% idle and then that 5% you want a bit of perf within a particular power budget. Something like a TV, cablebox, or a wake up sample send data in goto sleep situation.

They are probably referring to pre-silvermont(pre-2013) which were in-order execution.

Yes, that's why they brand some of the top SKUs Pentium and Celeron. But these are for embedded uses where branding is less important than actual features/performance.

In the target market "Atom" means "low cost" which is exactly what Intel wants.

This isn't right, either. In Intel's lineup the Atom brand is the most expensive brand using these cores. The Pentium and Celeron branded parts are the cheaper and cheapest ones, repsectively. "Atom" is basically the "Xeon" of its family.

I see it more as "really low power".

I've got a quad core Atom mini PC running plex and general file-server duties, and the thing is not only passive but sips energy.

On the other hand, it could be a form of price anchoring for their more expensive chips. In which case, a slightly tarnished reputation is actually a plus.

Perhaps. It's confusing though, that there are Atom server chips that are complete garbage, then some that actually pretty decent.

And awful Linux support. Many people with x86 tablets hate them.

Linux support for x86 tablets has improved a lot as of late. There are a few problematic chipsets, e.g. with PowerVR based graphics, but they're rare.

The PowerVR issue was much bigger when netbooks were all the rave. They were usually sold with XP Home running on 256-512MB RAM which was barley enough to run the base OS let alone a single program. The first thought was to toss Linux on the system but you were immediately thwarted by missing graphics drivers. So you had to run in vesa mode resulting in worse performance than Windows XP. Shame because a friend had a nice Toshiba that was completely useless from the day he bought it and wound up tossing it after just a year. So many useless netbooks...

I can't speak to your tablet use-case but as a general statement Atom is absolutely fine, even great under linux.

Intel actually has long had some of the better Linux support in the market in general, especially when compared to the early Zen hardware which needed a few years to build up critical mass (and of course it dumps all over the ARM-based experience, having a non-x86 processor is several notches upwards in complexity/difficulty of the experience). In particular they were an early mover on the open-source graphics driver thing (several years ahead of AMD), and their Linux driver has been the gold standard for stability/specs compliance for a long time. The chips underneath them aren't the fastest but the driver is clean and sensible.

The era where it was bad though, it was phenomenally bad. Before the present era of Intel-designed graphics cores in Atom chips there was a range of atom chips in some netbooks and tablets that used PowerVR graphics, and these machines were absolute horror shows.

Fair enough, I guess that's the difference then. I've always used the ones with Intel graphics.

This. I don't think someone designing an ATM cares if the CPU can run Crysis.

The Atom is like the 737 MAX.

American car manufacturers have shown no interest at all in selling small cars but have been forced to by regulators. Thus the Nova, Chevette, Cobalt, Sonic, Neon, Gremlin and other names you don't remember.

Honda and Toyota could not stop making the Civic and Corolla if they tried -- if they did stop for a year they would see people buying 3 year old cars at new prices and be shocked at the money they are leaving on the table. (Honda in particular has been trying to phase out the Fit for the CR-V but they may not have the discipline to be able to do it.)

Atom is a Chevy Nova that is being marketed as if it were a Toyota Corolla. Crap like that should be forgotten in six months, not waved around to remind you how bad it is.

I remember the chevette being a very popular car that was partly responsible for bridging GM out of a sales slump in the 70s. Two oil shocks did a real number on the market for heavy cars.

I'm not really old enough to remember, but as I recall the chevette was sold at a slight loss because it got the fleet fuel mileage numbers up allowing GM to sell more expensive gas guzzlers. Of course profit is weird and it is hard to account for everything.

The Chevette was hugely popular in Europe as marketed by Opel and Vauxhall, part of the GM empire. Effectively it was an Opel sold in the US rather than an American car sold in Europe.

The Sonic is also an Opel designed platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_Gamma_platform

I think part of the problem is that so many North American Chevettes (and their Pontiac equivalents, the 1000 and Acadian) where sold with a 3-speed automatic transmission that made them unbelievably slow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMsXLYFU0pU&feature=youtu.be...

I generally don't care too much about performance. I was completely happy with the performance of my '85 Toyota Tercel with 65hp. But I don't think I could handle 0-60 in 30 seconds...

Yes, that's just too slow. The same car with a stick shift did just fine.

Thus the Nova, Chevette, Cobalt, Sonic, Neon, Gremlin and other names you don't remember.

Three of these models have seen refreshes and a resurrection in the market in the last generation, dunno if your intent was to suggest they don’t exist anymore and were forever lost to history but they do but they most definitely were not.

They are also forced to by market realities (which you bring up). They can't just ratchet up the prices to where they would get the same margin as for an SUV. But many people can't afford that.

The big 3 made a conscious decision to get rid of their cars because they constantly had to do incentives to make them sell. Compare and contrast to the Japanese makers who tend to be less likely to do so. IMO they weren't selling as many fits as they wanted, and my gut also tells me the new trade agreement may have had an impact (I will admit I haven't dug into it and checked the foreign content and if it would be out of range.)

Heck, Subaru actually moved their US Impreza production to be domestic. If a few players stick to the car market for a while I feel like they will be rewarded for doing so. Not everyone wants the extra cost of an SUV.

Really?

When I go to a "car" dealer it seems the cars are all sold out but they have a long line of SUVs on deep discounts.

My dad would go to American car dealerships in the 1970s and they would refuse to sell him a small car. Every time I've been in an American car dealership since it has been the same story except for a small window after 2008 when you might find a small car.

Last time I went to a Honda dealership the Fits were all sold out because the factory washed out but they had plenty of CR-Vs made in the same factory.

US manufacturers can’t make small cars profitably with their labor costs, but are required to sell them because of CAFE. They are only going to make enough to reduce their CAFE costs, no more.

Right.

So I am sick and tired of the media repeating that "Americans don't want to buy small cars" when the fact is that "American car manufacturers don't want to sell small cars."

The problem is the big three have massive pension costs inflating their assembly costs. For them, it makes perfect sense to focus on larger cars, SUVs and trucks where cost of assembly is way lower proportion of sales costs.

Funny you said that about the Chevy Nova...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Fift...

It is the genius of GM that they sold Toyotas and also that they did a joint venture to take their carmaking to the Japanese level.

It's probably time to reevaluate that opinion. Apollo Lake/Gemini Lake are extremely competent little chips. The latest uarch puts them around a Core2Quad performance, perfectly acceptable for light desktop usage scenario.

I've been using one all summer for web browsing/citrix/etc so I don't have to run my big gaming rig in the summer heat, and it's been great. There's a seller on Amazon who has been clearing out the NUC7PJYH (J5005 based) off and on for the last year or so for $125 and I've picked up a couple. Despite the official spec they do support 16GB of memory and they also have the new media block with HDMI 2.0b support and HEVC 10-bit decode, they are super great for the price.

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