Atom, Athlon, or Nano? Energy-Savers Compared

SYSmark 2004 and Power Consumption

The communication benchmark of SYSmark 2004 does not show huge performance differences between the three solutions, as the difference is within a 10% range.

The overall score is dominated by Intel’s Atom, most likely due to its excellent memory performance and the Hyper-Threading feature of the Atom 230 processor. AMD and VIA are behind.

Average Power Requirement during SYSmark 2004 Run

We looked at the average power consumption during a SYSmark 2004 run : Intel’s Atom showed the least power requirement, followed by AMD. VIA’s Nano L2100 takes the last position with the highest average power requirement, which is due to the higher peak-power requirement, as you’ll see on the next page.

Total Power Used for SYSmark 2004 Run

Finally, we also tracked the total power used (in Watt-hours) to complete an entire SYSmark 2004 run. The ECS system with the 945G chipset and the Atom 230 required 46 Watt-hours ; the Gigabyte 780G board with AMD’s low-power Athlon 64 2000+ took 59 Watt-hours ; and VIA’s Nano required the most power at 61 Watt-hours. We’ll put that into perspective with performance on the next page.