More and more I am hearing about the Intel Atom (Silvethorn) branching out into the desktop realm. With MSI coming out with the NetTops, and other companies sure to follow, can the Atom stand up to Vista. Most notably i have read articles involving Shuttle, a company that specializes in smaller “Gaming” computers (and from a technician perspective a pain to work on). Now I’m sure you have heard your share of Vista stories, but just keep in mind that XP took 5 years to become good. With that said it still doesn’t change the fact that Vista is power hungry, people with the right hardware reap the benefits of Vista while others who lack the hardware fall short. Now bring the Intel Atom into the equation, running at 1.6ghz with 512KB L2 Cache you would think its a perfect match for Vista, since Microsoft states Vista HB will run on a 1Ghz cpu with a minimal 512MB Ram. But when you get through all the false advertising and look at it through a technical perspective you would see its just not a match

Using Shuttles X27 as an example, (pictured below) the marriage between the Atom and this companies profile is a win situation, for years Shuttle has been taking processors which are normally found on standard desktops and putting them into this small cube. But the bottom line people is that the Atom is not even close to a Vista rated CPU, even running with 2GB Ram, it falls short in all benchmarks. Now the Atom Dual Core may be an other story once its released, and you can be sure that Microsoft will continue to push the major companies to exlusively support Vista on all machines (including ones that should not even run it).  So time will tell but rest assured in due time Intel Atoms will take the world by storm as technology grows smaller both in the Industrial and Commercial field.

Shuttle Atom Design