Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
Not surprisingly, the desktop-class Athlon II, running at 2.8 GHz, finishes this test the fastest. It’s followed by Intel’s 10 W Celeron SU2300. The E-350 takes a third-place spot not far behind, and Intel’s Atom brings up the rear way back there.
Of course, iTunes is single-threaded, so we can see just how badly AMD’s Bobcat core beats Atom on a clock-for-clock basis (we’re talking one 1.6 GHz core per processor here).
It’s probable that most folks aren’t going to push a lightweight system based on E-350, Celeron SU2300, or Atom 330 any harder than an iTunes encode. But we wanted a closer look at threading performance, and MainConcept is able to provide that.
The performance story is indeed much different here, since Atom includes two cores and Hyper-Threading support. Instead of the blowout seen in iTunes, ASRock’s E350M1 is just barely able to scrape by the IONITX-L-E. Then again, remember the Atom board still costs $190 compared to the Brazos platform’s $110 or so. Even if you factor in the benefit of onboard Wi-Fi from Zotac, you’re still getting a lot more performance for your money via Brazos.
Here, Intel’s Atom processor actually manages to sneak past AMD’s E-350. With that said, if you’re doing heavy lifting in HandBrake, it’s likely worth spending money on a separate motherboard and desktop processor, rather than trying to get mobile architectures to do that job. Even the low-power Athlon II is 285% faster than AMD’s E-350.
This really goes without saying, but if you’re expecting to run desktop-class workloads, you shouldn’t show up with a mobile-oriented processor. The Athlon II X2 240e simply mops the floor with the three other contenders here.
