atom processor

Runs WD good on a atom processor?

what speed cpu?
how much memory?

from what I have read, its an OK PC for doing things like internet , email
and use a minimal XP
but not cpu intensive things like video editing
as long as you set wd to do just the basics, then it will be OK

AFAIK all Atom-based PCs are currently 1.6GHz by default and typically come with 1GB memory.

For the sake of debate, could I suggest that WD ought to be tweaked to run reasonably fully (maybe not every feature turned on) on an Atom PC. I can see these machines - eg as in the Eee-box (ie the desktop version not the laptop/netbook) that’s already out in the US and available this past week in the UK, albeit in limited supply - becoming the ideal option to run as a dedicated wx-logging PC. It’s physically very small/compact, uses little mains power (20W or so), runs Windows XP and is relatively inexpensive at somewhere around

well, then its more powerfull than my WD dedicated PC, and that handles webcam and video generation OK :slight_smile:

Yes, but the Atom is a CPU with a simpler architecture that can’t do as much clock-for-clock as eg a P4/Core type Intel design. Maybe a 1GHz Celeron is a rough benchmark for an Atom?

Since our earlier debates (on a Meteohub/NSLU2 related thread) I’ve been mulling this over and I have to say that I agree. :smiley:

Though if I go that route it would probably still be a Meteohub/NSLU2 that was the main feed of data to that PC for some time to come. To some extent that would be for historical reasons, but there would be other reasons too, e.g. it allow use of an RFXCOM to collect data from more OS sensors that standard OS consoles can handle, the Meteohub/NSLU2 can also feed some types of data and graphs to the website (either as fallback or simply to help spread the processor loads),…

One of the appeals of a low power consumption PC running WD 24/7 is that it would, I hope, allow me to add 1-wire sensors too…

Atom CPU’s feature hyperthreading, so mine gives me twice as many bogoMIPS as the P4 I have on my lap (some 6600 vs. 3200). Granted, bogoMIPS is sometimes defined as “the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing,” so I’m happy that mine can do twice as much nothing as a regular P4.

Apart from the joke: I use my Aopen xc ubox as a server, but I wish I had one for regular work: they are very fast and have no problem with all the modern graphical bells-'n-whistles. My box uses 40 Watts, compared to 190 Watts for my AMD Athlon desktop. The 40 Watts could be less, but the north- and southbridge used on my mobo are very power inefficient and require forced cooling. Really funny to have a mobo where the cpu can do with a heat sink only and the southbridge has to be cooled by a fan.

Hans

I’ve just acquired an Eee-box (the 160GB hard drive version with Windows XP for GBP200) on which to run some trials of wx software. If anyone has any questions on this specific type of compact, low-power PC then feel free to ask on this thread. Can’t necessarily promise an instant answer but will try and help.

How’s it going?
Do you feel that the eee-box is up to running, say, WD with 5 minute updates of a clientraw based website, plus WxSIM running several times a day, 24/7?

I was using a 1.3GHz Duron? P3 type processor and two webcams before it started crying (ok on one webcam and videos). I was doing animated gifs and videos, the full basic WD website with much the same content (lots of extras) I have now and i think the faster FTPUPD.exe we have now would have saved the brick. I was uploading intensive gif and 640 x 480 pics and it did handle it just. But I was getting some FTP over population as they were too slow getting through the uploads. I’m sure the atom will cope very well.

Well, I’m quite impressed with the EeeBox itself - it’s a very compact (not much bigger than a DVD case though a couple of inches ‘thick’!), stylish little unit that only consumes 20W when running continuously and it runs cool. All the reports I’ve seen seem to suggest that it’s perfectly happy running continuously 24/7 - it’s early days yet of course since it’s only been out a few weeks, but there seem to be no obvious problems running it continuously as a weather software PC.

As to processing power, well we know that the Atom has maybe only around 60% of the power of say (one of the cores of) a Core 2 Duo running at the same clock speed, but my feeling is that this is more than enough power for most wxPC set-ups. The problem is knowing what to benchmark it against. It may be adequate for maybe 90-95% or more of such users but someone somewhere will want to be running WDL updates every 2.5 seconds, plus frequent updates on 2 webcams plus no doubt some other wx-related stuff. There’s obviously got to come a point where the Atom (or any CPU type) will start to crumble.

If someone had defined a benchmark for performing wx-related tasks, based eg on WD if you like, then I would be happy to set a trial running, but I’m not aware of any such benchmark so I can’t really offer any objective score for performance. All I can do is try to judge against the power that some specific wx programs seem happy with. And in general in my experience these programs don’t seem to need a lot of power.

I’ve got Weatherlink running continuously on an old VIA EPIA 500MHz box, generating 5-minute (IIRC) website uploads etc and that seems perfectly happy. I’ve got another copy of Weatherlink generating data and some additional graphs for WDL with uploads every 12 secs (I think it is) on an 800MHz VIA EPIA box (www.elyweather.co.uk/wdl) and again that seems perfectly happy.

So my guess would be that an Eeebox would handle your requirement comfortably. But as above if anyone would care to come up with say a WD-based benchmark - ideally one that gave some sort of score for speed - then I’m happy to give it a go.

That is my (untested) impression too.

Have you (or anyone) seen this:
http://www.fit-pc.co.uk/
That claims just 4-6W, but less processing power than the eeeBox of course…

No I hadn’t seen that one before. Interesting one that illustrates how one branch of the PC tree is continuing to evolve - ie a significant amount of CPU power in ever smaller packages, accompanied by ever smaller power consumption.

I’m not sure how this particular one would fit into a set or list of possible roles for a wxPC. It’s obviously a plus that it can run Windows XP but beyond that I’m not sure. I’d have said that the Eeebox was small enough to be pretty unobtrusive as a weather PC in a home/office setting - I’m not sure that being smaller still has many practical advantages simply in terms of size. Also. the Eeebox power consumption is low enough that reducing it further isn’t honestly going to make much difference to office/household energy bills. But both Eeebox and Fit-PC still need enough power to preferably be mains-powered if run 24/7. (You need a fairly sizeable solar power PSU to run even a 5-6W device reliably and continuously during a northerly latitude winter). So my take would be that I’d rather have the substantially greater processing power of the Eeebox which is also significantly lower priced than the Fit-PC.

But if the next generation Fit-PC can reduce its total power consumption further, to say 1-2W then it becomes more cost-effective for it to be powered by a solar power PSU and this might open up its potential applications further. For example it might make it viable to use such a device at a remote AWS site to provide real-time data, assuming that there was some kind of comms link available. The only fly in the ointment there is that a device to run a comms link (eg a GPRS modem) does itself consume a significant amount of power (eg 5W) so reducing the PC power draw further only helps the overall power consumption to a limited extent.

What I’m unsure about is where the advent of devices like the Fit-PC leave things like the NSLU2 (which I know is no longer made, but similar devices also exist). I think the fact that the Fit-PC can - presumably - run standard Windows programs means that it’s a lot easier to program for and power consumption is probably comparable to an NSLU2. Probably the only thing remaining in the NSLU2-type device’s favour is lower price and the gap here is narrowing - isn’t a low-price (

Saving say 10W (I’m assuming that the eeeBox doesn’t draw 20W all the time) 24/7 with electricity even at, say, 15p / kW hr saves less than

Ah, OK - that’s interesting. But my question still remains. What would people see as the benefits of running a MeteoHub/Fit-PC unit vs say an EeeBox running WD? The latter is an all-in-one solution - it logs the data, updates a linked website etc etc. The MeteoHub (AIUI which may be wrong/incomplete) still remains just a data server, requiring a further downstream version of WD/whatever to provide full processing of the weather data. I guess the Fit-PC could itself manage to run WD, but then what’s the MeteoHub angle?

Indeed. I wasn’t trying to distract from that - it just so happened that the relevant comparative hardware data was ready to hand on the Meteohub site.

It can’t match the breadth and depth of possibilities that WD provides, but it can produce and upload graphs and web pages, it can upload data to a range of weather networks including CWOP & WU and it can produce clientraw*.txt for WDL (but max refresh/update rate for clientraw*.txt is 5 minute intervals). I was already a WD user before I started with Meteohub so I mainly use it as a super data-logger, 24/7 feed to the Scottish Weather Network, and fallback feed for my website (I don’t run WD 24/7). I know that a number of other users also use Meteohub as a feed for WD (and some for WSWIN) , but other (perhaps most?) Meteohub users use it as a complete solution in itself.

I’m sure it could easily manage the Linux console version (even the NSLU2 can manage that!). I suspect that with WinXp and standard WD it would at least manage with modest processing settings.

RFXCOM support is something that Meteohub has that WD doesn’t.

PS. You can trim the extra odd Watt off the PC-Fit consumption by turning off WiFi. You can also use an IDE SSD instead of a ‘mechanical’ drive - I think that would reduce consumption a little too? The recommended Fit-PC configuration for Meteohub uses a 4GB SSD.

Right, so these are advantages of the MeteoHub software really rather than anything directly to do with the hardware platform? And in principle any compatible hardware (eg an EeeBox running Linux if that were compatible, but presumably could easily be made so even if the answer’s no right now) would yield the same benefits?

So the importance of MH is as alternative software to WD/Weatherlink/Whatever or potentially as a preprocessor for eg WD users who don’t want to run their main PC 24/7 rather than as a combined hardware/software solution. (But perhaps the preprocessor angle loses its appeal, at least for non-RFXCOM users, if you can run full-fat WD on an EeeBox say as an alternative and do everything with one low-power box? There seems to be little or no (UK) price advantage to the MH hardware, other than NSLU2, compared to an EeeBox. Or is there perhaps still a perception that an MH platform running relatively simple software may be a more robust/reliable solution for capturing core data compared to more heavyweight software solutions like WD. So the extra complications of running a 2-step data handling solution (ie MH + a main PC running WD) might be outweighed by the perceived extra reliability of the MH front-end?)

Sorry - these points may be obvious to MH users - just trying to get my own thoughts organised correctly as to where MH now fits in!

Sort of - but hardware can come in to the equation as well because in places (3 countries so far - USA, Czech Republic and Italy) there are suppliers who sell Meteohub pre-installed on suitable hardware.

Yes. One option I have is to try installing it on my Asus eeePc (essentially a matter of replacing Xandros with a bare bones Debian etch-and-a-half, then adding the Meteohub package). I don’t know anyone who has actually done that (the new generic x86 option only became available last week), but it should be possible.

Quite likely - at least for people who want or need the power and flexibility of WD.

For those who don’t want or need the power and flexibility of WD, a standalone (i.e. not acting as a pre-processor) Metehohub - especially where it is obtained as a software/hardware package, which might also include a Wx - might be seen as a “simpler” solution…

I don’t think there is a single answer to the question. Very much a matter of horses for courses, and the arrival of low energy use PCs with adequate power to run Windows apps, probably more adds to the variations possible than makes any given answer more widely the right one!

I can now confirm that a Fit-PC Slim running WinXp can easily handle what I ask of WD (connection to Meteohub[1], produce and upload clientraw, testtags & trends-inc every 5 minutes[2]).
Running a 5 day WXSIM forcast slams it to ~100% for the best part of 2 minutes, but the impact is not so heavy that WD hiccups while that is happening.

2 Task Manager images attached.
The first shows CPU usage with a direct keyboard/monitor connection. You can see the spike at each change of minute, but at other times useage is very low - mainly just little blip a WD calls Meteohub every few (5?) seconds. The slightly broader ‘on the minute’ spike is the every 5 minute file creation. The every 5 minute upload (offset by 1 minute from creation), hardly has any extra impact. The longer peak (a bit under 2 minutes) was WXSIMATE collecting and pre-processing data for a forecast. WXSIM itself produces a similar effect (a few minutes later).

The second image shows the effect of watching the Fit-PC via VNC. The VNC connection started about halfway along the graph where the ‘background’ usage jumps up to around 50%.

A plug-in meter shows the Fit-PC drawing 6-7W. I have Wi-Fi turned off. The unit has a 60GB hard disk. With an SSD power requirement might be less?
I have the unit stood on its edge for optimum cooling (there is no fan). The case is warm to the touch, but if it were a cup of coffee I’d probably call it cold! :lol:
Last time I checked, the BIOS said that the CPU temp was 48oC and the Board temp was 40oC (in a room where ambient is around 18oC?).

Dragging this thread back to its original purpose, the Fit-PC Slim has 512MB of RAM and a AMD Geode LX800 500MHz. I think that is less powerful than an atom?

PS. The UK price of the Fit-PC has jumped up by


What’s the CPU/memory in that