Intel Pentium 4 Vs. Atom: A Battle Of The Generations

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

Most people know that Intel’s Atom is a slow, low-cost processor. But does it even offer enough performance to take it beyond desktop processors nearly a decade old? Today we're comparing a modern Atom CPU to two Northwood-class Pentium 4-based PCs.

Benchmark Results: Synthetics

SiSoftware Sandra 2010

The Atom 230 predictably falls behind in most tests from its lack of horsepower.

We found it more interesting to watch the dual-core Atom D510 dominate our Sandra test runs with the exception of the memory bandwidth test. Two modern 1.66 GHz cores are sufficient to beat the ancient, massive Pentium 4 at 3.2 GHz in some of the tests.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos