Benchmark Results: Productivity
Our threaded Photoshop CS5 test definitely favors the low-power Athlon II. Intel’s Celeron SU2300 also fares well, followed by AMD’s E-350. The Atom/Ion combination brings up the rear.
If ASRock’s E350M1 is part of a productivity-oriented machine, then it’s feasible that it’ll need to interact with a scanner and OCR software. Naturally, AMD’s desktop architecture reigns supreme here. But the Celeron, E-350, and Atom all fall within four minutes of each other (a veritable lifetime in the world of high-end CPUs, but relatively less in the power-optimized market).
Converting a WAV file to MP3 is another fairly realistic usage case for a low-power system. And what we see here is interesting. Lame is not threaded, so it’s certainly not surprising to see the 2.8 GHz processor tearing things up. More surprising is that Intel’s efficient Celeron SU2300 takes second place, with its 1.2 GHz clock. The E-350 is right behind, running at 1.6 GHz. And the Atom, with its in-order execution pipeline gets far less done at the same 1.6 GHz clock rate.
This is a result you’ll see again—so keep in mind that Atom really needs the parallelism enabled by a second core and Hyper-Threading to fully maximize its performance.
The same issues trouble Atom here in WinZip, which also isn’t threaded. The 1.6 GHz processor struggles to get the workload completed compared to AMD’s E-350, which runs at the same clock rate, but employs a more performance-oriented architecture. In fact, the Zacate APU is only a minute and a half slower than the 1.2 GHz Celeron SU2300, based on Intel’s Core 2 microarchitecture.
WinRAR is able to take advantage of processors with multiple cores, and the Atom’s loss isn’t as pronounced. Again, AMD’s desktop architecture takes the top spot, following by Intel’s 10 W Celeron, the E-350, and Intel’s Atom 330.
