Many of you are interested in what the Atom is capable of in real terms when we forget the fluff “good enough” and “for Internet use”. First of all for those who are not that computer savvy, Atoms are processors for mobile use made by Intel. Everything they could strip from the core and didn’t seriously impact performance got stripped, and everything that gave performance more than it hit consumption numbers got kept. Not the conventional way of getting around to designing a processor, but hey, it works!
The most common Atom processor is the N270.
1.6GHz core, 512 KB L2 cache, 47 million transistors what is it enough for?
On the Philippine Tech site Yugatech you can see a comparison chart between N270 and Z530. They’re both clocked at 1.6ghz, yet the N270 beats the Z series by not only a little. My findings show the exact same thing, I found the 1M SuperPi setting to finish in 104 seconds on my Asus 1005HA, though.
This particular benchmark is not enough to determine the speed of the processor, as many tasks are not about raw power. As hard it is to find resources in English, I was unable to spot anything else than SuperPi numbers. Here is one from netbooknews.it, don’t be afraid though, the pictures are hard not to decipher. According to their numbers N270 has about the third of single core processing power of another CPU found in light notebooks, SU7300. Cinebench is another synthetic test geared towards floating point operation performance. The great thing is that you can see Atom 330 in action on the same chart which gives a basic idea about how fast it really is when it comes to real life applications. (about 15% faster)
Atom 330
Tomshardware put up a really extensive test about this processor, I don’t really want to add much to this atom review, just one thing to note though. On one of the last pages you can see how they divide performance with the power it requires to complete tasks. A not-so-efficient E7200 Core 2 Duo seems to be least power consuming for the work done, which means that in spite of it’s brutal TDP (compared to Atom) it would still get computing tasks ready for less electricity than one of the mobile processors.
Fortunately netbooks are very rarely used for scientific calculations or video encoding, so that’s all fine. When the processor mostly runs in idle mode, peak power has little importance. For what they’re designed they’re good choice.
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