Intel D945GCLF Review Featuring Intel's Atom 230
Submitted By steven on Jun 7 2008 at 12:20 AM
Intro and Specs
Intel D945GCLF
Featuring the Intel Atom 230 Processor
The Atom processor is quite the little surprise from Intel and is rather unlike anything we have seen from them in recent memory. Rather than taking existing architectures and modifying them for use in mobile devices or low cost desktop platforms (as they have done in the past), Intel has taken a new approach using the latest in manufacturing technology. Atom was designed from the ground up and, as such, does not necessarily share much in common with Intel's other products.
Atom is built on Intel's first “In-Order” architecture in over a decade and, in a departure from current designs, it features a rather lengthy 16 state processing pipeline. Due to this design, Atom will only process the instructions in the pipeline in the order that they are received. This is opposed to the “Out-of-Order” architecture used on more modern processors, where the instructions can be re-orientated in the pipeline and executed in the order deemed most efficient. Intel designers sought to improve this efficiency by utilizing a technology first seen in the Pentium 4 series of processors – HyperThreading.
HyperThreading allows the processor to deal with 2 threads simultaneously by allowing stages of the processing pipeline, which would otherwise be idle, to process more portions of data. Because of this, an operating system may see a HyperThreading-enabled processor as two processors. However, a HyperThreading-enabled processor is not nearly as efficient as having two physical cores, as seen in todays multicore processors. But with the Atom's larger, 16 stage pipeline, HyperThreading could prove quite effective. In an effort to establish its effect on processor performance and power consumption, we will put HyperThreading through a variety of benchmarks in the testing portion of this review. We will begin by looking at the layout of Intel's D945GCLF motherboard, with the embedded Intel Atom 230 processor.
Specs list:
Processor – Integrated Intel Atom 230 1.6ghz with 533mhz system bus
Memory – One 240 pin DDR2 SDRAM DIMM slot (up too 2gb)
Chipset – Intel 945GC (northbridge) Intel ICH7 (southbridge)
Audio – Realtek ALC662 High Definition Audio Codec
Video – Intel GMA950 (82945GC Graphics Controller) (15pin mini D-SUB connection)
Network – Realtek RTL8102EL 10/100 Mbit wired Ethernet
Peripheral – Six USB 2.0 ports (4x on IO panel)
2x SATA 2.0
1x parallel ATA IDE interface
1x Serial port
1x Parallel port
PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
Expansion – 1x PCI connection
Posted by Anonymous on Oct 22 2009 at 5:29 am
Great review!