![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , July 29, 2008
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Atom vs.VIA Nano
A battle of the most powerful processors on the face of the Earth? Nope. Who sucks the least? Not really, but closer. Marketing teams will have you believe one thing, but we are here today to show HardOCP readers what they likely care about. Which one just works better, Atom or Nano?
Real World Performance
Most of you know that we covet the “real world” stuff. It is what we base most of our opinions on around here. The synthetic benchmarks do not often come into play when we are building conclusion statements. So you might say this page is where the rubber meets the road.
It is also worth saying that even the metrics on this page do not mean as much as our overall computing experience. If a system is “herky jerky” and difficult to utilize easily because of the hardware, we will let you know. The last thing anyone wants is a “fast’ computer that drives you nuts because the cursor seems to be rendered with a Tommy Gun.
DivX Converter 6.6 Pro
DivX Converter is known to many of you. In the example above, we ripped a DVD to a .vob and then proceeded to encode the movie to a default setting .divx file. The movie is around 2 hours in duration. We see here where the Nano cut almost 2 hours off the encode time compared to the Atom. Worth mentioning here is that an Intel Quad Core Extreme QX9770 at 3.2GHz will do the job close to 170 minutes quicker than the Nano. (Score: Atom-2 / Nano-5)
Windows Movie Maker 6.0
Our real world metric this time consists of encoding a raw HD 1080i MiniDV scene from a Sony Camcorder to a variable bitrate .wmv file at 640x480. The Nano bests the Atom by a full 6 minutes of encoding time. Again the QX9770 will do this in less than 3 minutes. (Score: Atom-2 / Nano-6)
LAME 3.97
I was even surprised at how much better the Nano did at MP3 encoding than the Atom. The Nano simply dominated the Atom. For comparison the QX9770 only pulls it in at 2 minutes 20 seconds which makes the Nano look pretty spiffy as well. (Score: Atom-2 / Nano-7)
WinRAR
WinRAR is usually a good indicator of memory bandwidth. Given that we saw Sandra show us that sustained memory bandwidth on the Atom and the Nano are pretty much equal, we once again have to point to CPU architecture as the reason for the Atom loss. This application scales very well and a QX9770 will see it through in about 1.15 minutes. (Score: Atom-2 / Nano-8)
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPRESS
TMPG is another encode program, this time we set it to encode a Mpeg 2 movie file to a variable bitrate .wmv file. Again we see the VIA Nano dominate the Atom. That said, an Intel QX9770 will encode it about 600 minutes faster while soaking up 4X the wattage as well.(Score: Atom-2 / Nano-9)
Quake4
And finally we have a lone gaming demo. This in no way represents real world gaming. We ran our custom demo at 640x480. The numbers speak for themselves. I almost feel sick to my stomach for giving either a “win” considering 640x480 is not even close to playable. (Score: Atom-2 / Nano-10)