Performance
Performance
With solely the Atom 330 in mind, the product is of course not real fast. But it's fast enough for Windows Vista and your basic usage like listening to music, browsing and everyday small stuff. And with the help of the GF9400 chipset, high-definition content playback as well.
To understand what small amount of processor and system power we are working with here, let me show you some other products and where they rank in performance compared to what we are actually testing.
Queen CPU test
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example -- with HyperThreading disabled -- the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. However, with enabled HyperThreading the picture is controversial, because due to architectural bottlenecks the Northwood core runs out of internal resources and slows down. Similarly, at the same clock speed AMD K8 class processors will be faster than AMD K7 ones due to the improved branch prediction capabilities of the K8 architecture.
CPU Queen test uses only the basic x86 instructions, it consumes less than 1 MB system memory and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware and thus is a multithreading CPU Benchmark with MMX, SSE2 and SSE3 optimizations.
So we'll show you a couple of charts, now I'll stick to some low-end gear. I';m fairly sure that if I inserted a Core i7 in there what would happen.
- To the left, the an Atom 230 (single core) ION chipset, thus NVIDIAbased reference motherboard.
- Then the Atom 330 (dualcore) on a 945GC chipset, thus Intel based motherboard (Intel's offering)
- The Point of View ION 330 motherboard with GF9400 (ION) chipset.
- And all the way to the right an 60 USD Athlon X2 7750BE on a AMD 780 chipset.
If you look at scaling, you an understand the tremendous task for the Atom 230 to be able to handle 1080P movies. It's just not powerful enough. And that's where the GPU (ION) will help out really well.
As you can see the CPU performance of IOM is on par with Intel's 945GC chipset.
ZLib CPU test
This integer benchmark measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library Version 1.2.2
CPU ZLib test uses the basic x86 instructions, it is HyperThreading, and multi-core (CMP) aware. A very good test to measure multi-core performance among platforms.
A second test again purely for you to visualize what Atom processors can do and are all about.
If we run a compression test, we again see how little the Atom 230 really has to offer. But it's enough for browsing, heck even Vista. With the 330 dual core processor you have way more reserves though.
Memory Read test
One somewhat poor result to look at was memory performance. The choice of SODIMM DDR2 memory though cheap, will have a negative effect on overall performance due to slower timings. Actually we doubt a little that dual-channel kicked in properly, but there's no BIOS function to alter it. The BIOS is rather simple, no tweaking options whatsoever. Very basic.
