Comparison of Atom and Pentium 4

It would not be nice to compare atom processors with the latest high power processors like Intel core i3 or AMD A4 etc. But it makes sense to compare the performance of 5 year old Pentium 4 processors with Atom series.

There is performance test data on Tom’s Hardware which compares an atom 230 (single core) , Atom D510 (dual core) and two old Pentium 4 at 2.0 GHz and 3.2 Ghz. Atom D510 beats old Pentium 4 in almost all tests where both the cores are used. Passmark benchmark result according to its website is as follows (click through to get details of each processor on CPU world) -

  

                                                               Passmark CPU mark
                                                                  (higher is better)

Core i3 2330M  (2 core,2.20GHz)                             2504

Pentium B940    (2 core,2.00GHz)                            1942

Atom D525       (2 core,1.8 GHz)                               715

Atom D510       (2 core,1.66 GHz)                             659

Atom N450       (1 core,1.66 GHz)                             318

Pentium 4         (1 core,3.2 GHz)                              524

Pentium 4         (1 core,2.2 GHz)                              279

As obvious core i3 nukes Atom in performance tests. But for those who find old Pentium 4 (3.0 GHz) sufficient for their day to activities Atom may look better performing. The important thing to note is that applications that do not use multi-threading (use only single core) may not run fast on Atom. Atom N2800 which is clocked at 1.86 GHz is definitely more powerful than the second generation Atom processors (D510 or N450) shown above.