Low-Power War, round 2: AM1 vs. Cherry Trail

[Dirk Broer]

The first round of the low-power war seems to have gone to AMD. The AMD SOCs had more features, CPU-wise, and their boards had more features too -as I described in the previous Low-Power posting. Idle power consumption was on a par with Bay Trail and only under stress did the Intel SOCs have a lower power consumption.
Most motherboard vendors did not even bother bringing out a board with Intel's flagship Bay Trail SOC, the so-called 'Pentium' J2900 (but really an Intel Atom under another name), no doubt because for less than the price of a J2900 board you can buy a AM1 board, an Athlon 5350 plus 4 GB of RAM. Over here I can only get J2900 boards from Asrock, and searching for J2900 boards by ASUS, MSI or Gigabyte drew a blank.

But Moore's Law wasn't formulated by an Intel founder just for fun. Them at Santa Clara might as well be honorary members of motorcycle gang 'No Surrender': they just won't give up. So now we are at round two, and Intel has a new contender series. Gone is the Silvermont-based Bay Trail-D and in is the Airmont-based Braswell (sounds like Haswell), with an even lower TDP -though the value of that metric can be questioned- and a better IGP.

The waiting now is for AMD's new AM1 SOCs, based upon Mullins/Beema.