News VIA launches world's smallest quad-core PC

I'm always curious to know how these sort of systems compare to older existing stsyems.
For example: My parents have an Athlon X2 PC at home. Would this new tiny system offer lower, similar or better performance? (Assuming both had the same SSD) The clock kspeed is much lower, but then it's a newer design and it has twice as many cores? Given that they only do office stuff and web browsing, I'm assuming this system would be enough.

 

I wonder the same thing, as I reckon systems like this would probably cover 90%+ of the time people actually spend on their PC's. I always feel a little guilty with my big power PC whirring away while I spend hours just surfing the web / sending email / doing very basic office work...

 

shame it does not have dual nic, would be a awesome pfsense box.

 

Sounds like an ace HTPC box.

 

The question ultimately will be one of availability... If you're in the UK and want a Pico-ITX board from VIA that isn't 5 years old, then you have to get it from far afield. From the USA on ebay seems to be the easiest way. And pay circa forty pounds for the postage, then VAT, import duty and a handling charge to get it released to you once it hits the UK adding (I guess, number pulled out of thin air) about another forty to sixty pounds... with postage, VAT, duty and handling fees coming to approximately fifty percent of the value of the product, it becomes madness.

 

If I was Inch High Private Eye I'd buy one

 

It will likely be more power efficient, quieter, and produce less heat, but I highly doubt it'll be much faster, if at all. First of all, VIA's processors have never been known to be fast. But secondly, depending on what you do, a dual core is all you really need. Even single cores can be enough for the average user. Tablets are good proof of this - they're popular because they appeal to the average person who wants to just sit back and browse the internet, so single core ARM processors (which generally perform worse clock-per-clock compared to x86 processors) often work just fine.


While I think parallel processing is becoming more of a reality in the future, a cheap quad core for a web browsing and email computer can potentially be a worse decision. If you only have maybe 3 tabs open at a time (or a browser that uses 1 process for all tabs), you'd likely get better performance out of a 3GHz dual core than a 1.5GHz quad core of the same architecture.

 

It's really difficult to judge if we don't know the price.

 

It doesnt look any smaller than my old Zotax Zbox, great litle PC that has spent the last couple of yeas woring behind my bedrom TV as a HTPC. Wit a SSD it's quick and totally silent. (-:

 

Price in the US starts @$320 : http://bit.ly/VPelKQ