I just cant wait any longer for that Kohjinsha SC3 to arrive. The videos and feedback from early tests have proven to me that this could be one of the best UMPC / mini-notebooks yet. Its tiny, light, well-specified and looks great. The question we are all asking though is…”How good will Vista run.” We’re one step closer to the answer today because I’ve just recieved a set of CrystalMark test results from DFJ. I believe this is the first ever set of test results for a production Menlow (Silverthorne/Pulsbo) device so lets take a quick look and I’ll make some comments below.

Detailed results here.

The tests were done on a stock device (Vista Home Premium. 1GB RAM) and overall, its looking good. The CPU figures are quite impressive. Better, in fact, than any other UMPC platform. Only the Intel notebook-based CPU’s used in the Q1 Ultra Premium and the Sony UX are better. Memory speed is also good. Top marks! Looking at the disk (Spinpoint N, HS06THB, 60G, 4200 RPM, PATA(ZIF), 8MB CACHE) I see a high average which, if you look at the detailed results, translates to a max read speed of 30MB/s and a max write speed of about 27MB/s. For a 1.8″ drive, this is about as good as it gets right now.

Looking at the graphics scores shows some very low-end results. They dont quite tally with the Vista performance score we saw so for anyone looking at gaming on this - dont! For the 3D components in Google Earth and Itunes, we’ll have to see how it performs when we do tests. I suspect it will be OK.

For a big list of comparable CrzstalMark results, see the list that Frank keeps over at Tweaks2K2.

Note that the CrystaMark test doesn’t show us any video performance results. The Poulsbo chipset contains hardware acceleration for many common codecs and we wont see those results until someone does tests with a media player. In theory, results should be good.

So will it run Vista? The jury is still out on that one. Ive seen Vista Home Basic running acceptably on the HTC Shift but it wasnt exactly fast.  With some optimisation, i think Vista is going to be acceptable for most people. For others, upgrading the RAM to 2GB might be the answer and for a few people, it simply wont be good enough. The flip-side of the coin is that we know it would run XP extremely well. I hope, after time, a downgrade to XP will be possible. Ive taken the precation to include Vista Ultimate in mz purchase so at least i’ll have the license when it’s a possibility!

Thanks to Direct From Japan for the test results.

Guess what the first word of this Nvidia video is? a) Welcome b) Today c) Intel

The Tegra demonstration is impressive, showing HD video content being decoded in around 1W instead of 12W but they clearly didn’t cover all bases. For a start, you can’t even run a big screen backlight at 1W and if I’m doing my research correctly I can see that Tegra doesn’t include a communications and radio subsystem. Even so, what exactly are they trying to compare here? They are putting a general purpose CPU (i’m guessing its Celeron there) against a dedicated video codec in a video decoding test. Not only that, they are showing their new tech against Intel’s old tech. Booo!

I’m sure the NVidia board is impressive but come on guys, lets see you doing some general purpose computing with Wifi, BT, 3G, storage, USB and compare it against a Silverthorne/Poulsbo combo that will do the same in a MID-sized board in under 5W. Bring out the MIDs Nvidia. Or better still, send them to me and I’ll perform a special selection of Chippy tests on them.

Yesterday, I completed the final part of a series of upgrades that have been done to my Q1 Ultra to bring it up to what is close to my ideal all-round UMPC device. In this article I’ll outline what I’ve done and give you some detail about my most recent upgrade, swapping the 60GB hard drive out for an 8GB flash drive. The difference is quite remarkable. Not only do test results show up to 4x the read speed and 2x write speed but boot-times are quicker and the overall responsiveness of the system is improved dramatically. If you need convincing that SSD’s are fast before you take the jump, check out the video at the end of the (long and media-rich) post. Note that much of this applies to other devices that use 1.8" drives. The Sony UX, Fujitsu U810, HTC Shift and others.

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Most, if not all of you reading this will have heard of the Firefox browser and many of you will have tried Firefox 3.0 beta. I held back from using it for a long time because it was beta software but the latest release candidate seems stable and has me converted on all platforms now. Firefox 3.0 is fast. Firefox 3.0 is memory efficient. Firefox 3.0 has great features and overall its a clear winner on UMPC and netbook platforms, especially when using online applications.

Like Safari, it appears from my test results that Firefox 3.0 can process java-heavy pages on a Ghz-class UMPC faster than the data arrives over my 6mbps Internet connection which means that for rich Internet applications, the bottleneck is at the remote server and there’s very little else you can do to speed up the experience. Apparently, java processing in FF3 is many many times faster than in version 2 so this explains the big improvement with online applications. Not only is the speed improved but there are some great features that will appeal to UMPC users too. But first, here’s some test results. I took 5 devices and ran speed tests on 3 browsers [*1] using reader.google.com as the target page. It’s a java-heavy page and there’s no flash or major numbers of images to process but its typically my slowest-loading browser application. It represents a typical online application and for web-workers, its a good, tough benchmark.

More info after the jump…

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UMPCFever continue their hands-on with the Aigo MID and have been playing with the device running under Windows. While they were there they did a CrystalMark test which gives us the first ever look at how various parts of a Silverthorne-based MID might perform. However, I would take these results with a large pinch of salt as they appear to be on the low side. The memory speed and disk speed figures look especially low so there could be some driver issues. Certainly the graphics figures should be ignored at this stage.

I’d advise to wait for real-life browsing and video figures from the system while running the Atom-optimised Moblin build rather than a vanilla XP build that has never heard of Poulsbo or Silverthorne!

On the image at the top right, from the top are the total score, the ALU test score, the FPU test score the MEM, HDD, GDI, D2D and OGL scores from the Crystalmark test. For a list of UMPC crystalmark scores, see Ctitanics table of results from various sources.

UMPCFever Aigo MID CrystalMark test video.

Update: A more detailed discussion is continuing on Atom performance details in the forum here.