Low-Power War: AM1 vs Bay Trail

[Dirk Broer]

For the cost conscious cruncher there seems to be a pot of gold at the horizon: both Intel and AMD claim a very cheap platform, and they claim that to be both on purchase and running costs.

While neither AM1, nor Bay Trail CPUs are on sale yet (and you can wait till hell freezes over for the latter, as they are soldered onto the motherboard), there are at least specs out for the motherboards and the Celeron version of Bay Trail can even be bought already. Should you do that?

Let's compare the features of the two platforms with each other:

	AM1	Feature	Bay Trail
	Mini-ITX or μATX	Motherboard Form Factor	Mostly Mini-ITX, but at least one μATX: look to the right!
	Upgradable Socket	SOC placement	Soldered on
	Athlon: 4 Sempron: 2 - 4	Cores	Pentium: 4 Celeron: 2 - 4
	25 Watt	TDP	10 Watt
	16-32 GB 1600 MHz (Mostly DIMM, sometimes SODIMM)	Max RAM	4-8 GB 1333 MHz (Mostly SODIMM, sometimes DIMM)
	2x SATA 6Gb/s	Storage Interface	2x SATA 3Gb/s
	Athlon: AMD Radeon® HD 8400 Sempron: AMD Radeon® HD 8280 or AMD Radeon® HD 8240	IGP	Intel® HD Graphics
	Yes, most of the times	PCIe2.0 x16 slot possible?	Yes, sometimes

Based upon these specs I declare the AM1 platform to be the winner of the Low-Power War...