Atom power hits town

We've got our first Atom machine in. Full benchmarks and other details later, but... it's interesting. It's the ecoquiet RM One 50, so called because it uses less than fifty watts.

Which it can do: with the monitor turned all the way down, it took 44 watts with the CPU idling and 46 to 47 when we whacked the load up to 100 percent. With the monitor at half-brightness, that's up to 56 watts, or 58 at full tilt. Power slumps to around 30 watts when the monitor's off altogether.

As for performance and compatibility: graphics are a bit sluggish; you can see Windows redraw window content after you drag another window over the top, old skool, but in general it's responsive enough. The machine was delivered with XP; I put Hardy Heron on under Virtualbox. and that ran perfectly well. Was a bit startled when the system reported two CPUs, as the dual-core Atom is still Very Secret, but then, headslap. Multi-threading's back in town. Two threads, one core.

Was going to have a sexy motherboard shot for you - but the RM is designed for schools, so it has nasty spiky anti-vandal security screws to fox the kiddiwinks. They, like me, know that Maplin sell the drivers for that, so that's Monday's task.

And Tuesday, the chip is launched and we'll be flooded with Atomic mutations.

Can't wait!