(02-03-2014, 02:44 AM)tueidj Wrote: It's not hard to improve performance when you start with something that runs like a Pentium 2.
Regardless of what instructions they support and how many cores they have, they're still at a major disadvantage due to being in-order only. They're a bigger joke than Itanium was.
Since Atom has been released at 1.6 ghz and a much lower TDP, it's been right under Conroe and above Netburst in performance. Windows can also schedule these cores and threads with no issues or affect to performance. If these CPU's were a joke, they wouldn't be so far wide spread across the board being used for tablets, phones, notebooks, even thin client desktops. There is not a cpu on the market that can match performance under at least 20w that the Atom delivers.
And Itanium wasn't really even an x86 cpu.