AMD Athlon 64 2000+ vs. Intel Atom 230

In yet another surprise, Intel’s Atom, known for powering a lot of netbooks these days and the Eee Box, has more competition to field, this time from AMD. AMD hasn’t had a great record lately compared to Intel when it comes to pure power, but it looks like they may have another winner on their hands. How is it that AMD has bested Intel?

Well, for one, the K8 architecture has been a good design ever since AMD first implemented it. If you go back to when AMD first unleashed the Athlon 64 on the market you’ll see that it trumped Intel’s offerings at the time. Intel, if you remember, had something of a flop with the P4 after the success of the P3. Of course, the more things change the more they stay the same and Intel brought out the Core Duo, and then the Core 2 Duo, and they’ve been the kings of the consumer processing world since then.

And then there’s the Athlon 64 2000+, which is AMD’s answer to Intel’s Atom, the low-power high-efficiency offering meant to power small devices. In essence, AMD has slowed down the Athlon 64 as much as they can and it has resulted in a CPU that draws less power than the Intel offering, generates less heat, and is more powerful. And it runs slower! Hey, it’s just like when the Athlon 64s originally ran slower.

So it all sounds great, right? Well, there’s a catch: the platform currently only goes as small as microATX. There are smaller AMD boards available, but those run the Geode, not the Athlon 64. However, if you’re looking for a small solution (a file server, perhaps, especially since the Athlon 64 2000+ board supports 6 SATA ports) and don’t need the absolute smallest platform available, this may be one worth looking into. At the very least, you do get a real graphics solution, but don’t expect to turn it into a Blu-Ray player (just get a PS3 for that).

Check out Tom’s Hardware for a thorough review and analysis (and lots of graphs) of the Athlon 64 2000+. Oh, and “ohne” is German for without (for those graphs when you see them).