Benchmark Results: Applications
The Atom-based X2700 takes so long to load Adobe’s popular image editing app and open the test .tif that our Photoshop benchmark consistently fails to run. AMD’s Athlon X2 4050e encountered some start-up issues as well, but we were eventually able to get a 203 second run from it. Early on we see that shedding performance in favor of a smaller form factor is not the way to go if you’re an artist.
Without optimizations for threading, it’s the Athlon X2’s clock speed and architectural advantages that push it past the Atom.
WinRAR will run in multiple threads. Incidentally, both the Atom and Athlon X2 support threading—the former through Hyper-Threading and the latter by leveraging a pair of physical cores. But AMD’s advantage widens here, as the Athlon’s dedicated execution resources crank through the compression job significantly faster than the 1.6 GHz Atom.
In this threaded virus scan, AMD’s Athlon X2 finishes our benchmark in less than a third of the time taken by an Atom-based X2700.