Atom, Athlon, or Nano? Energy-Savers Compared

Benchmarks: Applications

The application benchmarks are most relevant for desktop users, who consider using such a system as a versatile low-power machine. We can imagine using such a PC in the hallway or the living room, to check email, Google things, find directions, and for similar tasks. In these cases, you don’t need a lot of performance and low-power machines are typically a good choice.

We used iTunes to check the performance for transcoding MP3 audio into Apple’s AAC format. VIA’s Nano L2100 clearly is the fastest low-power processor.

Lame is a popular tool to convert raw audio (wav format) into MP3 audio. Again, Nano wins.

WinRAR is a thread-optimized file compression tool (versions 3.6 and up), which Intel’s Atom can take advantage of. Still, VIA’s Nano still is more powerful.

WinZip is another file compression utility, which has not yet been thread-optimized. Hence VIA’s Nano does well again.

More Results: Compare with Core 2 Duo

If you want to see how the three systems stack up against a Core 2 Duo E8500, please see the image gallery with additional test results.