Intel Atom N270 on Intel GMA950

[susikala]

Hello,

I'm looking into buying a standard recent netbook with Intel Atom N270 (1,6GHz) on an Intel GMA950 board. You can get those with a 6 cell battery and 1-1.5gb RAM for around €300 in Germany today, which is not a bad deal.

My question is, if anyone has that kind of netbook and is running Linux on it, and if so, have you managed to watch videos in 720p? Well, the standard resolution on those is usually 1024x576, but I'm still interested whether they can play half-HD videos, possibly with framedrop...

By the way, is there any video offloading on Intel IGPs?

[movieman]

My desktop Atom 330 system with Intel IGP can't play 720P reliably, so without a multi-threaded codec or IGP video support I doubt the netbook could. A single Atom thread just isn't fast enough for HD.

[susikala]

I remember reading somewhere you need upwards of 3 GHz to play full-hd, which would mean 1.5 GHz should be enough for half-hd... but I know Atoms are relatively weak in comparison to normal Intel processors, and it's not all about GHzs...

[movieman]

I know Atoms are relatively weak in comparison to normal Intel processors, and it's not all about GHzs...

Yeah, with in-order execution, etc, the Atom really needs hyperthreading to make the most of the CPU. I know people have said they can play 720P on a single-core Atom in Windows using a multithreaded codec.