HP Mini 5103: Looking at the Dual-Core Atom N550
by Jarred Walton on December 17, 2010 1:05 PM ESTHP Mini 5103 Subjective Evaluation
You can read our impressions of the HP Mini 5102 for additional input on the build quality and features of the 5103. Nothing has changed much in those areas: this is a great feeling little netbook, and outside of the change in color from black to “espresso” (brown) it’s the same. You get the best 10” keyboard I’ve ever used and solid build quality. Our test system does come with the smaller 4-cell battery, so expect to see a hit in battery life, but unless you need 8+ hours we’re okay with the decreased weight and having a battery that doesn’t jut out on the bottom. (Or you can simply purchase the larger 6-cell battery, which comes standard on the $400 SmartBuy model.)
A few other areas have “changed”—or rather, we received an upgraded unit that includes features we haven’t previously tested. The biggest upgrade is the display, so let’s focus on that for a minute. If you’ve used a recent smartphone, you have some idea what capacitive multi-touch displays can do for the user interface. In theory, adding such a display to a netbook would be a good thing; in practice, it’s not so clear-cut.
Touchscreen Analysis
There are two major issues I have with the touchscreen interface on the 5103. The first is hardly a surprise: speed. While it can be convenient at times to swipe a single finger down/up/sideways in order to scroll, the action is nowhere near as smooth or fast as on a good smartphone. Everything feels just a little laggy, and a large part of that feeling probably stems from the fact that this is Atom running a full copy of Windows 7. If there’s one thing I’d like to see Google get right with Chrome OS, it’s making Atom netbooks feel at least as responsive as smartphones. More on that in a second. And if you want to do something “crazy” like playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook? Forget it! There’s so much lag (mostly from the slow IGP) that your performance will be far lower than normal.
The second issue with the touchscreen interface is precision. Tapping on the screen to “click” often misses your intended target, and the same goes for dragging, selecting text, etc. With a UI build around touch, this could be alleviated, but the standard Windows UI isn’t sufficient. A mouse is a highly precise pointer that targets a single pixel; replacing that with your stubby fingertip that covers perhaps hundreds of pixels and then trying to determine where you clicked is difficult at best, and the result left me wanting.
Chromium OS to the Rescue?
With the above experience, I decided to give the Chromium OS a try on the 5103 (using the latest Flow build by Hexxeh). I actually tried the same build on an Atom Z520 + GMA 500 netbook, and that was a complete bust (likely no good drivers for the GMA 500); the experience with the 5103 was a bit better, but the touchscreen wasn’t recognized so I was left with a standard netbook. Chromium did boot up relatively quickly, but performance and optimizations for something like the 5103 aren’t present so the net result was even worse (in my opinion) than running Win7. Maybe the final shipping version will iron out the wrinkles, but we’ll wait and see.
The final aspect of the touchscreen that I need to comment on is the display quality. Subjectively, the contrast is clearly low, but that’s nothing new. The touch coating on the other hand made things look a lot worse than a standard 10.1” LCD. There’s a ton of “sparkle” across the surface of the display, and colors just look muted in comparison to other laptops. The objective testing results simply don’t tell the whole story here; I like the use of a 768p display on a netbook, because 600 pixels is just too short for typical usage, but with all of the above concerns I’m more than happy to ditch the touch interface for the time being. Perhaps that’s why you can no longer get the 768p + touch from HP, leaving it solely as a 600p option.
Broadcom CrystalHD Redux
The other area I want to discuss before hitting the benchmarks is the CrystalHD card. There was some speculation that my poor experience with Flash 10.1 and the CrystalHD stemmed from some other area. Lack of memory, Win7 Starter, and the single-core N450 CPU were all cited as possibilities. Well, the 5103 covers all of those bases and guess what still doesn’t work properly: that’s right, HD Flash videos. I tried a couple of 720p YouTube videos using both Firefox 3.6 and IE8, and the results were both choppy. It was a bit better than the 5102, so the combination of dual-core Atom and 2GB RAM did have some positive impact, but I still dropped over 400 frames (400 to 800 in multiple tests) in a 2:15 HD video clip. This happened with Flash 10.1.85.3 as well as the newer 10.1.102.64, so nothing has changed in regards to Flash support of the CrystalHD.
It is worth noting that this is purely a Flash issue: using Internet Explorer 8, I was able to grab the MP4 video file out of the cache directory and play that in MPC-HC using the Broadcom video decoder plug-in. CPU usage dropped from an average of nearly 60% to just 12.5%, and there were no issues whatsoever with dropped frames. The Broadcom decoder is capable of doing H.264 decoding at a much faster rate than an Atom CPU; now we just need the driver support/Flash support to make fullscreen YouTube, Hulu, etc. work properly.
Summary
I really don’t have much else to add here that I haven’t said in the 5102 review. This is a nice little netbook, but the price puts it into direct competition with a lot of laptops—including substantially faster CULV, Atom + ION, AMD Nile, and upcoming AMD Brazos offerings. We’ll see in the benchmarks next that performance is still a big issue, and the existence of 12.1” ultraportables like ASUS 1215N makes this a very difficult sell from the performance side of things. You’re basically paying for a “grab and go” netbook with software that will keep it in sync with your desktop, and as a small secondary or tertiary computing device it has something going for it. HP has also added a “DayStarter” feature that shows you a static overlay of your calendar while Windows boots, for those times when you just need a quick look at what’s happening. You can get nearly everything you need with the base $400 model, though, and that’s what we’d recommend as anything over $500 for an Atom-based netbook is simply too much.
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JarredWalton - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
CPU Bench is for desktop because those are able to run on a consistent platform. To do a mobile bench, we'd need all of the various mobile CPUs, and several laptops that allow us to switch out CPUs. Basically, comparing desktop and mobile CPUs is apples to oranges; both are fruit, but they're not in the same family. We don't have server chips in bench either, for the same reasons.Of course, we would like to put together a mobile version of bench, but we haven't yet hashed out how to best accomplish that task.
rundll - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
"we also expect to see them jump on the Brazos bandwagon next year. That could mean improved performance in every area relative to Atom, hopefully without sacrificing battery life."Your hope won't be fulfilled. And the reason is very very simple.
The faster Brazos, Zacate (1,6GHz), has a TDP of 18 W. This model beats by 10-20 % the double-core N550 and 8,5 W TDP Atom. Of course, the graphics performance is in a class of its own. But the key words here are 18W vs 8,5W.
The slower Brazos, Ontario (1,0GHz), has a TDP of 9 W. But this chip should end up being slower than aforementioned Atom.
nafhan - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Well, there's more to battery life than the TDP of processor/chipset combo, and there's more to a computer than it's battery life. A good computer is all about balance, and AMD is betting that Brazos based netbooks will be more balanced than Atom ones. That said, if battery life is bad enough, it will be a problem. We'll find out soon.duploxxx - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
very very soon, since HP will anounce mini notebook within a few days with brazos at CES.Indeed TDP doesn't mean anything at all. Preview of anandtech already showed that together with other review sites. Single threaded perf will be much better on brazos then this one, multi not. GPU is a no brainer and not even to be mentioned for comparisson :)
DanNeely - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Assuming linear scaling and looking at the cinebench numbers (the only bench that was obviously single threaded) the 1.2ghz, 9W brazos will be 20-25% faster than an atom. The atoms will still have an edge in multi-threaded apps; but where windows netbooks hurt the worst is in single threaded UIs, so AMD could have a winner here in general usability even if Intel managed to win more total benchmarks.Roland00Address - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
Thus you can't compare the tdps and find out battery life. First tdp is worst case scenario, for the worst chips at the hottest time, it isn't the the average full load power consumption. Furthermore you can't establish the average power consumption of an item just by knowing the maximum power consumption, you need to know the idle power consumption and how long the item is in the different power consumptions states.For example see below link
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1039&type...
The SU2300 has a tdp of 10w, the Ion Chipset (first gen) has a tdp of 12w or so. So total tdp is about 22 watts. If we compare it to the Zacate/Brazos which has a tdp of 18w, using your logic we assume the tdp should only be about 4 watts apart. But what is obtained in reality is a difference of 9 to 12 watts depending on whether the system is on idle, load (cinemark), or load (gaming).
Or put another way the d510 has a tdp of 13w the chipsett has a tdp of 2w thus total tdp is 15w. It should have a lower power consumption than the zacate system if you were just looking at tdp. Yet the Zacate/Brazos system beats it at idle power consumption, load power consumption on cinemark but the Zacate/Brazos system uses more power when load gaming.
Taft12 - Monday, December 20, 2010 - link
Wow, properly owned several times. I guess you'll never mistake TDP for actual system power consumption again.rundll - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
Owned? My ass.You guys try despirately convince that 18W TDP Zacate has lower power consumption than 8,5W TDP Atom. Good luck with that, I don't buy it.
AMD does partially very sloppy work here 'cause even the single core Zacate has 18W TDP.
Surely one can argue around the subject but me being owned? My ass.
When comparing double core 9W TDP Ontario at 1 GHz and double core 8,5W TDP Atom at 1,5 GHz the winner in power consumpion can actually go either way. I don't actually make any statement in my first post concerning power consumption but simple make an edjucated guess that Atom might end up being faster. Surely one can argue here what ever he wants but me owned here? My ass.
Here again AMD does partially sloppy work with this new chip 'cause even the single core Ontario has TDP of 9W. Single core Atom has 6,5W TDP. The difference in TDPs is so significant that real life power consumption win can easely go to Atom.
Again this surely can be debated over but me being owned? My ass.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
So going off of this:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-perf...
Comparing the Atom D510 to the Brazos E-350, AMD wins pretty much every meaningful test on the CPU side. That's a dual-core 1.6GHz beating the dual-core + Hyper-Threading 1.66GHz. The best result is in the single-threaded Cinebench test, where E-350 wins by 65%. Cut the clock speed down to 1.0GHz (or 1.2GHz single-core) and it should still be able to compete. I suppose the N550 looked at in this article will come out ahead on quite a few benchmarks relative to the netbook AMD parts, but only on the CPU side.
The other factor is the GPU, which is the wild card. These are still not gaming systems, but Brazos ought to be able to do HD Flash (and other HD content) where Atom on its own cannot. Unless there's a huge performance deficit (i.e. more than 30%), we'll be looking at really slow Atom vs. slightly slower Brazos on the CPU side. We'll also have okay Brazos vs. completely pathetic GMA 3150 on the GPU side. The question will then become pricing as well, because if Brazos netbooks end up at $450, you can simply get Atom + NG-ION to effectively get around the GPU argument.
I do have to admit that my "hopefully" is probably optimistic, but until I have final hardware I won't call the battle won or lost by AMD. I do think that the Bobcat architecture has some potential to win the netbook/nettop contest with some tweaks, but at the current specs it doesn't look like it will happen. Instead of getting the equivalent of CULV + decent IGP at netbook pricing, we'll get Atom + decent IGP at higher than basic netbook pricing.
rundll - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
I'd like to emphasize here that I took stand to the battery life in the first place. Just like the headline above tells.1. Zacate, the 18W TDP part of Brazos, won't beat 8,5W TDP Atom in battery life. This is my original statement and what I really wanted to point out. Obviously I don't have hard evidence on that but I absolutely stick to my statement anyway.
2. Ontario, the 9W TDP part of Brazos, will or will not beat the aforementioned Atom in battery life. I simply didn't take any stand here either way. Instead I pointed out that here Atom will probably win the speed contest.
All the time I referred to the double core models since that's what was tested in the article. And yes, I was talking about the CPUs. And just because of that I also stated that Brazos' graphics are superior. But this is just some sort of a foot note 'cause my point being the battery life (and also the performance aspect couldn't been totally overlooked since you said this: <em>"That could mean improved performance in every area relative to Atom, hopefully without sacrificing battery life"</em>.
Further more, one can raise doubts that even in single core models Atom will win the battery life contest over Brazos. Zacate will lose, that's for sure. Ontario has a good chance to lose but this remains to be seen.
I also think like you that AMD can and will win some design wins here, the graphic performance being that good. And especially when the price plays in. But that's another story.