Intel Atom D510 Review, Performance, Etc. Round-up

It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at what Intel is up to these days and counted the Intel Pine Trail updates among those things. So, in honor of it being almost a year since talking about what Intel has been planning for their ever expanding netbook and nettop line, let’s look at what is finally on the verge of coming out in the near future to a netbook or nettop near you.

First, let’s get what we’re talking about onto the table. The new CPU (I’ll list a few, actually) is a revision to the highly successful and energy thrifty Intel Atom line and really falls under the nettop line. If you’re looking at getting a nettop and don’t have one already running with an Intel Ion setup, you may want to consider waiting to see what Intel has up their sleeve…or not. Let’s see:

Intel Atom D510 — dual-core, TDP of 13w

Intel Atom D410 — single core, TDP of 10w

Intel Atom N450 — single core, TDP of 5.5w

All three of the CPUs are hyper-threaded, meaning they can execute on twice as many threads as there are cores, and of the three, only the Intel Atom N450 is the likely candidate for netbooks because of the power consumption (somewhat ridiculous considering they’re all quite low, but for netbooks, you need really low).

Anyway, as the Intel Atom D510 is the one making the rounds to the big boys now, and the general consensus is that it’s hitting somewhere in the 5-10% area of improvement over the previous Atom. That’s certainly an increase in performance, and we’ll all take an increase any day over a decrease, but is it enough?

If you’re planning on replacing your day-to-day machine with nettop (given the obvious performance limitations), then you’d probably be just fine with something running the new Intel Atom D510, but you’re going to run into frustration the moment you play a Flash video. Why’s that? Because Intel still hamstrings their chipsets when it comes to video.

Intel has made improvements, and it’d be wrong to not grant them that, but this is one area where nVidia has a serious advantage thanks to the folks at Adobe for adding video acceleration to Flash. That’s right: if you’re running a nettop with the nVidia Ion chipset, you’re going to find Flash video plays just fine for you. But for those of you running an old nettop or a new one without nVidia Ion? Sorry.

Here’s the summary from PC Mag, and a really, really in-depth and excellent read from Anandtech.