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Comment by flyinghamster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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...)

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