Atomic Power in Supercomputing

The entire industry took note when INTEL announced its Atom line of CPU's. Intel's ATOM is a new type of processor; it's tiny, consumes ultra low power. It delivers the full capabilities of an x86 desktop CPU. This implies that it can run windows and will work with a 945G chipset, DDR2 RAM. Atom is more basic than Core 2, being only a single core processor.The Atom line has been specifically designed for low power applications. But if you are thinking of buying it and fitting it into your desktop motherboard then there's some sad news for you b'coz these CPU's cannot fit onto usual desktop motherboard, it's available to the vendors so as to assemble them with a compatible motherboard, then the CPU is soldered on to motherboard.I can assure you that doing everyday work like, browsing, listening to music is easy, but when I opened word, excel, access, PowerPoint simultaneously it took 20 minutes for atom to open it, despite its Hyper Threading technology. Certainly, its performance is not going to set the world alight. When I ran a video playback test to test its Home Theater PC capabilities it ran smoothly, but the CPU usage was around 80 percent, so it was clear that it'll not support full HD.The specifications for the motherboard are reasonable - the integrated Intel GMA950 video chip can use up to 8MB of the main memory, the RAM and FSB speed is limited to 533 MHz, connectivity is via a 10/100 onboard LAN chip, ans the number of USB ports available is four.So it's clear that it's not a users' delight in performance. It is all about spending no more energy than required. Also it does not use fans instead relays on two heat sinks for cooling. With a 4W TDP it not only saves electricity bill, but increases backup time when running on a UPS. While the Atom 230 loses out on performance to any entry level desktop package, it certainly is unbeatable on the power consumption charts.

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