Atom performance

MarkG

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Oct 13, 2004
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An dual-core Atom would probably be similar on heavily multi-threaded applications, but slower on single-threaded. A single-core Atom would be significantly slower.
 

Freakykiwi

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I can't remember which benchmark I ran but an Atom based EEEPC was around half the performance of my 5 year old Athlon 64 3200 laptop and the same as a 7 year old Pentium Mobile 1.3GHz. I haven't benched a dual core (I have used one as the basis of a mini-itx Windows Home Server for a client) but if I recall correctly the reviews at the time they were only marginally faster for productivity applications.

They are a very weak processor and not often used in a sentence with the word performance.
 

MarkG

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Sounds about right. The dual-core is basically just two single-cores sharing one FSB, so in single-threaded applications it won't be any faster than the single-core... because of the in-order execution even the single-cores really need two threads to make the best use of the resources they have.

Personally I'd stick with the Athlon unless I really wanted to lower the noise and power consumption; that's the main benefit of the Atom chips.

Edit: Oh, on an absolute scale I believe I benchmarked my Atom-330 at roughly the same performance as a Cray Y-MP... which would have been impressive 20 years ago but not so much today :).
 


To be honest comparing a Atom to a full fledged CPU that has OoOE abilities is kinda stupid. its not meant for normal desktop use but for small mobile devices. In fact LG has a new phone coming out with Moorestown built into it (next step of Atom) which I think is pretty cool.

As for single threaded apps, even a quad core wont outperform a single core in single threaded apps. Thats why they are single threaded.