UPDATE: 2.0GHz Intel Atom Z550 benchmarks now added.
Though there are three different models of the Sony Vaio P in the US, each one runs on the 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor. In other regions, the 1.6GHz Z530 and 1.86GHz Z540 chips are available and paired with the same 60GB hard drive and 64GB/128GB solid state drive storage options offered in the US.
Since these other models boast faster processors and can be purchased through importers like Conics and Dynamism, anyone interested in the mini notebook has much more to choose from than what Sony has made officially available to them. But how much "better" are these alternate configurations?
We have members from all over the world using every existing SSD/HDD and CPU combination in the Vaio P forum, so it wasn't long before all of the CrystalMark benchmark results could be put into the comparison chart below.
| |
1.33GHz 60GB HDD |
1.33GHz 64GB SSD |
1.60GHz 64GB SSD |
1.60GHz 128GB SSD |
1.86GHz 128GB SSD |
2.0GHz 64GB SSD |
| Mark: |
16540 | 23704 | 26722 | 26336 | 28937 | 30160 |
| ALU: |
4333 | 4306 | 5335 | 5384 | 6113 | 6600 |
| FPU: |
3475 | 3467 | 4275 | 4271 | 4955 | 5305 |
| MEM: |
3494 | 3472 | 4012 | 3767 | 4291 | 4384 |
| HDD: |
3695 | 10946 | 11206 | 11277 | 11630 | 11692 |
| GDI: |
1251 | 1197 | 1463 | 1303 | 1468 | 1669 |
| D2D: |
161 | 97 | 161 | 106 | 162 | 168 |
| OGL: |
221 | 219 | 270 | 228 | 318 | 342 |
You can see from the 1.60GHz scores that the only difference between the 64GB SSD and the 128GB SSD is the storage capacity, which is why the 1.33GHz/128GB SSD model (top of the line in the US) isn't included.
What you can also see from the chart is that the most remarkable difference comes not from the processor speed, but from the disk drive. Yes, the faster CPUs give the ALU/FPU numbers a noticeable bump up, but it's not as significant as the increase seen between a HDD and SSD.
See more Vaio P features and reviews.
CrystalMark scores from the Pocketables Forum (2.0GHz scores).
Word cloud image created at Wordle.net.
There is a typo in the chart. It should be 60GB for the 1.33 surely?
Kind of sad that my several year old, much smaller, UX180 scores 23k in Crystal Mark.
Fixed! Thanks for catching that, scoobie.
As ever with umpcs its two steps forward, one step back. The ux180 has a keyboard that is pretty useless in my opinion.
Yes, the UX had a THUMB-BOARD, something you can use on the move, whilst holding the device in one or two hands. Try doing that trick with the P! You could always add a folding BT keyboard (I love the iGO) if you want to sit down and type. Bottom line is that my UX390 with XP and SSD is much smaller, lighter and faster than most versions of the P. Bottom line: The UX is a better microPC than the P. As a UMPC? it depends on how you define the genre!
IIRC, weight-wise the UX is not that different from the P. Everyone feels differently about usability and form factor, but given the price differences, my vote goes to the P, hands down. The price alone reflects an appropriate amount of evolution during the period it took to get from the UX to the P.
Whether it’s deserving of an UMPC moniker or not isn’t really irrelevant.
In the chart the 1.33 Ghz model has higher ALU/FPU scores for the HDD version…?
Here’s a little limerick that popped into my head:
There once was a girl called Jenn K Lee
Whose web site, Pocketables, was open and free
In a twist of fate
that we saw too late
She became a fangirl of the Sony P
As I’ve said before… the Atom processor is a joke and the only party laughing, is Intel… all the way to the bank!
Let’s compare the 1.86GHz with 128GB SSD with the Everun Note at 1.2GHz with 60GB HDD for less pocket change. Doesn’t this clock speed gimmick seems like deja vu… anyone here remember the Intel vs AMD clock speed race of almost a decade ago?
Jenn your older post is my reference point: http://www.pocketables.com/2008/09/extensive-raon.html
Even at low power man… even at low power!
Intel’s claim is these atoms boast longer battery life… can someone post battery life figures for the Vaio P? My calculator battery can last well over a week, and it too can’t play 720p quicktime video!
diJenerate
The Vaio P speed is not particularly impressive for the price. Here are some CrystalMark results for mini-notebooks I own and cost much less: Lenovo x61s – 62,255; MSI Wind with 24% overclock and SSD: 40,600; an old EEE701 with 900mhz Celeron: 22,220
So guys which version is the best value for money? Sorry I’m not good with computers. Thanks.
Its nice to know how fast the Sony’s are, but I would be more interested in how the sony’s compare to the EEE machines like the 901.
I just ran crystalmark on my eee 900a (with 2gb ram and a runcore 16gb sata ssd, both user instaleld) while running firefox and open office writer.
Marks: 31983
ALU: 5307
FPU: 3744
MEM: 4450
HDD: 15174 (yeah, runcore sata ssds are great)
GDI: 2026
D2D: 867
OGL: 415
This makes sense as the processor-based scores are roughly the same as the P’s 1.6, which I think are actually the same chip.
Thanks for the comparison. The 900A’s CPU is the N270 (the supposed “netbook Atom”) whereas the Vaio P’s 1.6GHz chip is the Z530 (the supposed “UMPC/MID Atom”).
Standard and extended battery life figures are here: http://www.pocketables.com/2009/02/sony-vaio-p-battery-life-standard-vs-extended.html
Clearly you are the under the influence of hazmat and his P oppressing gang!
Or is this what happens when you take your Samsung Q1 into the kitchen?
i just got my kohjinsha sc3 and loving it. i love the tablet option and then trackpad. i couldnt stand the vaio p’s track ball. but on the other hand the keys on the sc3 are kinda tiny but i got ued to it. runs cool and fast. screen is just as nice as the viao p. like this thing better then the lenovo tablet i have to. i take this thing everywhere. the vaio is sexyier. its just that track ball that bothers me.
Alas, my Q1 is still sitting in the corner. I have been told, in no uncertain terms, that I can’t alter anything in the kitchen to accomodate yet another computer in another room. I’m still working on a solution, though.
Is it possible to upgrade from HDD to SSD in the Vaio P?
Its awesome how much faith the sony fanboys and sonyhaters put in ‘crystal mark’. Synthetic benchmarks FTW! Its very funny to see someone call the Atom a joke too. I can guarantee you are not a compeng (or even a proper pure-math compsci) graduate. The Atom is a really cool piece of engineering for alot of reasons. And as to your fanboyish complaint that the P can’t play 720p video? Mine can just fine (1.6 here in Tokyo), I’m guessing you are having player/driver issues. Arm chair quarterbacks / fanboys crack me up.
720p? Try 1080p, with the hardware acceleration of GMA 500, it works great too. The only performance issues exist are general computing and 3D rendering.
Which one is greater value for money guys? The 1.3 ghz with 64GB SSD?
Yes, there are some people in the forum who’ve done it: http://forum.pocketables.com/showthread.php?t=1818
Actually Comp Engineering graduate with 9 years embedded system design experience and no the crystal mark synth benchmark is only used for comparison… run two systems under the same conditions and see which does better… it’s called relative benching.
As far as 720p or 1080p, a ‘cheat chip’ approach does not count as good CPU engineering.
For the non-engineers (clearly not you RTokyo – you bought the P and run Windows!) that is where you use a dedicated set of registers in the CPU or dedicated co-processor to decode a specific/predictable instruction sequence thereby taking the work away from the main processing stack eg, divx hardware decoding in DVD players or the multimedia co-processor in the OMAP series from TI which incidentally can decode 1080p as well with the right software stack.
As far as the Atom goes, that is Intel’s follow-up to Stealey (A110) which is (as WiMaX was before it) a way for Intel to generate tonnes of revenue all the while doing very little new dev.
Making a processor on a design that you completed and sold under another name almost a decade ago, then reducing the micron process for fab to nearly 1/3 of the initial version of almost a decade ago (allowing faster clock on lower power and heat), then strapping a bunch of cheat-chips on it and integrating once outboard processes and buses into the same die (not a difficult task for Intel when you’re revisiting designs) and marketing the crap out of it, is also not good engineering!
…good business, bad ethics, but certainly not good engineering.
But of course I’m just an Armchair Quarterback… what do I know!
diJenerate
“…the only performance issues exist are general computing and 3D rendering…”
uh… you mean what any new x86 consumer PC should be able to do in 2009?
You should have saved the money and bought something with the CPU included… y’know, something that can do that general computing!
I get it… the netbook was a good idea when Asus did it with the eeePC, USD299.00 just for surfing… but this is ridiculous, spending more than you can get a core2duo/TurionX2 laptop for (with the 1.86GHz and 128GB SSD Vaio P) for something that can’t do general computing tasks? Even their UX series was a better job than this and that was severely overpriced… for the performance (even though THAT was good engineering!)
But whatever floats your boat bub!
diJenerate
I wanted to buy a netbook able to run Matlab (scientific program) without taing too much time.
I was evaluating the Everun Note, Eee PC 900HD (900 MHz Celeron with 160 GB HDD) and several Atom powered ones.
Because of money I bought the Eee PC 900HD and here are the test compared to the Sony:
Clock: 630MHz 900MHz 1044Mhz
Mark: 17330 23303 26141
ALU: 2342 3361 3902
FPU: 2828 4084 4791
MEM: 1722 2640 3120
HDD: 6387 7217 7281
GDI: 1578 2372 2794
D2D: 1938 2824 3312
OGL: 535 805 941
and I think that it is not so bad, for a “tested as made” stock 299 € netbook.
But I am not talkn here about “sexy factor”
Oops, forgot to say that I was running Win XP 3rd Edition, Firefox, Agendus during the tests
I just needed to post this as a comparison to the Vaio P at 1.86GHz with a 128GB SSD… this is the Everun Note at 1.6GHz (yes 260MHz slower) with a 32GB Mtron SSD.
Here is the same benchmark suite that was run on the Vaio showing the relative performance of the less expensive Raon digital machine.
http://www.umpcportal.com/uploads/newbb/3528_498d6f5ea2e75.jpg
…definately no general computing issues here!
The defence rests!
diJenerate
But the gps system is in all models or … ?
I have tested the Greek Version of Sony VAIO P VGN-P21Z (Intel Z520, 80GB HDD) with CrystalMark and the results are slightly different.
Here is the pdf file with the benchmark results of the greek Sony VAIO P
sorry for the double post I tried to pass the link as html code.
here it is anyway
http://laptopblog.gr/node/1225
Hi,
I can’t decide from buying or the 1.6 ghz CPU+128gb SSD (european P29), or import the japanese model with the 2.0 ghz CPU always with the 128 gb SSD. Which of these better value? I see that the ALU and FPU are better in the second choice but are these numbers really important for general use?
So you guys say that is better wait for the next upgrade that maybe they will change the gpu?
Totally and utterly subjective. My UX280 sits in its cradle, unloved, not because of the performance, but because of the usability. I get the romanticized idea of a UX in one pocket, a folding BT keyboard in the other, and maybe even a pocket mouse small enough to carry around with all of that, but at the end of the day, I don’t *like* to carry all of that crap in my pockets, so it all ends up in a bag. By that point, I might as well carry the Vaio P or a netbook.
Of course, there’s also a simple trick to using a netbook while standing up: Support it from the hinge and type one-handed. It worked for a Libretto back in the day, and it does the trick for most 9″ display netbooks. I’m sure the Vaio P is no different in that respect.
Funny, since “cheat chips,” as you call them, have been a way of life since the IBM PC.
Want to crunch floating point? Get a separate FPU.
Want color graphics? Get a CGA adapter, then EGA, then VGA/XGA/whatever’s around the corner.
Want a hard drive? Buy a controller card.
Want 3d? Get a Voodoo.
Sure, all of this ends up on the chipset, but not on the CPU. Even now, you have people buying El Gato USB dongles to encode HD video, and it’s not like anyone uses the Intel graphics chipsets as anything but a low-power stopgap. Shoving decoding onto that as opposed to running it in the CPU is far from a bad idea, and is, in fact, how damned near everyone does everything in this day and age, for a very simple reason:
General Purpose CPUs suck up tons of power. It is utterly foolish to attempt to decode HD video on an x86 chip when you can stream that data to dedicated (and cheap) hardware.
Of course, I recognize your username from the MicroPCTalk.com forums, so I expect the usual anti-Atom bias to defend a piece of hardware which is similarly crippled in terms of graphics hardware, and just basically lucked out with drivers that don’t suck horribly. The Vaio P is an unfortunate victim of some botched default installation, I’ll grant that, but there’s little reason that it should be performing that badly compared to a similarly built-up EeePC. Rest assured, that Core Solo (or Core 2 Duo, if you were one of the fanatics to send your UX to someone with the right tools,) isn’t doing you much good most of the time, unless you like having a very expensive hand warmer.
ux has way better gpu
is this with hyper-threading on???
if so then z is way weaker than n
and atom is shit CPU i need ux390n with core 2 duo u7700 mod!
How this compare to desktops like P4, Athlon XP, Celeron etc??
How would you guys say the 2.0ghz would fare for ‘general computing’? Using Word etc.?