Hacker News Reader

Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

The first generation Atoms were some of the worst chips ever made. By the end with the Bay Trail and Cherry Trail chips they were quite good, but Intel killed them in favor of M-series chips with the same performance per watt but five times the price tag.

View on HN

Bayfail was utterly broken on Linux until two years ago or so. There is a bugzilla entry with more than 1000 replies. And it appears that some platforms with that CPU still have issues with Linux, which according to that issue is yet another bug.

The biggest problems I had with Bay/Cherry is because they are 64bit processors but have 32bit UEFI. So the distro has to be able to install a 64bit version but from a 32bit UEFI. Most of the "mini PC" that came with those Atoms came with a 32bit Windows preinstalled, I assume for the same reason. Some distributions like AntiX, MX Linux, and Void Linux, can boot 64bit OS from 32bit UEFI.

Also WiFi/Bluetooth can be problematic when they are on SDIO, in my personal experience. Which anecdotally for me was about 50% of the time.

That might be why some manufacturers decided to disable 64-bit support on them, which as it turns out, is another MSR you can do a BIOS mod to unlock.

What does its compatibility with Linux have to do with how good it was as a chip?

Strictly technically speaking, not much, however having working Linux Open Source drivers extends the life of the product using it well beyond the point Microsoft, and/or the hardware manufacturers, declare it obsolete then stop any further development for that chip. There's a huge number of old systems out there that are supported by mainline Linux but couldn't run anything newer than Windows XP or 7, and they aren't just laptops. If you have put some money into a piece of hardware that still works perfectly and are forced to ditch it because either its manufacturer or Microsoft suddenly say "sorry, no more drivers, but here's an offer for the new model", that definitely sucks.

Earlier Atoms were close to crap for desktops, but they still have some uses.

I used a N455 based netbook for years as a motorcycle-laptop with a stripped down Debian. Unfortunately I didn't know about Alpine Linux back then, which could likely have made it a lot faster. Also, my home NAS uses a D410 CPU which is enough to support two ZFS pools and other services.

It still makes me angry the Surface Go and Surface Go 2 have inferior screens and build quality to the Atom-powered Surface 3.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com