Anandtech is running a review of an Atom based motherboard from NVidia right now. What grabbed my attention was Page 5 of the review where Anand compares Atom performance against and old-school Pentium 4 processor. It was very interesting! This particular motherboard has a pair of Atom processors, but the review also included benchmarks from a single-cpu Atom motherboard of the same kind used in most netbooks.
If you're thinking about an Atom-based netbook, this should give you a fair idea about how it should perform.
If you're thinking about an Atom-based netbook, this should give you a fair idea about how it should perform.
"If you look at the Atom 230 the Pentium 4 beats it by almost 20%"... but IMHO that's not too shabby. My main workstation is a single core 2.8ghz Northwood and I still manage to be productive. I consider myself to be a power user, and the truth is that unless media encoding or HD video is required these CPUs will give 90% of users all the power they'll need (for the next few years at least)!I think large IT departments will soon be looking to these systems as a middle ground between thin clients and fully blown workstations.