A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

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The latest entry into the UMPC market first stirred-up by the Eee PC is this new ultra-light from Raon Digital. It's beefy inside despite its tiny size, packing a dual-core CPU—AMD Turion—which, according to the makers, is a first. It looks barely bigger across than its 7-inch screen (with 1024 x 600 pixels), but squeezes everything else in there too, including an electronic dictionary function, Windows XP OS, Bluetooth and drive options that go from 80GB HDD to 12GB SSD. Full specs below.

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Via's Nano and Intel's Atom low-power processors are intended for slightly different purposes, but that didn't stop HardOCP pitting them against each other in performance tests, and coming up with some interesting results. In every single benchmark, the beefier Nano beat the Atom. In particular it was 59% better in MP3 encoding tests, 37% in Divx encoding and achieved double the frame rate in Quake 4. No surprises there: the Nano is designed to draw a little more current (53W against 45W) than the Atom, so it won't make it into quite the same hand-held gizmos as Intel's chip. But the tests revealed that under normal "desktop" usage, the Nano actually drew less power when idling. Looks like Via's got a hot one in its grip: we might expect to see more of this chip. [HardOCP via BBG]

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Intel's first Nehalem-based processor, Bloomfield, was originally set to launch in December, but Digitimes says these little demons will actually come out in September, hitting shelves in early October. Why the excitement? Nehalem is a brand new microarchitecture, replacing the Core one we're all familiar with. (Penryn was a shrink of Core, to make it more energy efficient.) Anandtech has a nice preview of Nehalem. To give you a taste, even on a "partly crippled, very early" platform, Nehalem smoked Penryn by 20-50 percent, while using only 10 percent more power. Yeah. [Digitimes]

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Intel has found another use for its tiny, low-power Atom chips--today they've announced intention to move into the system-on-a-chip industry, where they'll compete with ARM, MIPS, Freescale, and IBM among others to provide embeddable systems for things that aren't PCs. Namely cable boxes, manufacturing robots, security hardware, and anything else that needs an all-in-one brain. Initially they'll be using the Pentium M, but the transition to Atom should happen next year. Maybe this is what the "most of us wouldn't use Atom" talk was all about.[WSJ]

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Advanced CPU cooling may be mainly the domain of extreme overclockers or case-modders, but this new Damamics CPU cooler may tempt you anyway just for the thought of the tech involved. The upcoming LM-10 is the world's first commercial CPU cooler based on liquid metal Yup: liquid metal. Liquid metal has thermodynamic properties that apparently improve temperature uniformity on the cooling surface, and allow for decreased temperatures versus other cooling solutions. But most cleverly, since it's a metal you can pump it electromagnetically—the cooler has a no moving-parts silent pump that draws just 1W of power. Plus it sounds way more Terminator-esque than CPU cooling by plain old water. No pricing or release date info is available yet. [Danamics via Slashdot]

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This week marks the 40th anniversary of Intel, the people who likely made the CPU in your computer. To mark the occasion, the people at PC Magazine have put together a pretty comprehensive timeline showing every major generation of Intel processor from the first one to the current Core 2 Quad and Atom series processors. We've all used them at some point in our lives, and I remember my first Intel processor was a Pentium II running at a blazing 233MHz. I loved that laptop. What was your first Intel processor? Or which was your favourite? [PC Mag]

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Newly minted Emperor of AMD Land Dirk Meyer promised at his coronation last night that we'll more hear about AMD's low-cost, low-power chippie and their plans to take on Atom in November. He didn't mention the chip's name, which is rumoured to be Bobcat. (They're a fan of big kitty names too.) But at least we know it's coming, like, for sures. [Reg Hardware]

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AMD CEO Hector Ruiz is out the door. While he drove their burly competition with Intel, he's also responsible for AMD's poor acquisition of ATI and its lagging financials of late. Taking over is Dirk Meyers, who's more chip geek than businessman. Maybe that's what they need. [Cnet]

In a quarterly conference call today, Intel CEO Paul Otellini dropped the aforementioned diss of the low-cost, low-power 45nm Atom chipset that can be found in a few current and many future netbooks, redirecting attention to the just-updated Centrino 2 and somehow-still-alive Celeron platforms as more viable for most consumers, and more profitable evidently for Intel. Otellini has also described Atom as "something for the next 2 billion computer users" in developing markets, so I guess this is a us/them, poor/rich tech classes pair of statements. This does nothing to explain the strange excitement most of us have when thinking about US$200 laptops like the Asus eee, though. [Daily Tech

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