Atom vs. Nano: room for improvement

PC Watch has published a comparison of the VIA Nano L2100 (1.8 GHz-TDP of 25W) and Intel Atom 230’s (1.6 GHz-TDP of 4W) performances in addition to those of the reference chipsets from their respective manufacturers as other components were identical on the two test platforms. Overall, the Nano clearly has higher performances than its rival and this even in applications optimized for HyperThreading which enables taking advantage of the full potential of Intel’s CPU.

However, things are more complex if we consider each solution and their power consumption separately. On the one hand, there is the Nano L2100+CN896 combo that needs 58W in full load while the Atom 230 combined with a 945GC is "content" with 43W. For the former, another model probably could have done better and this without sacrificing performances too much (we were also surprised by the fact that the VX800U and its 3.5W was not used). In the latter, a better adapted chipset (i.e. conceived specifically for the Atom and not the Pentium 4) would have enabled to go much lower. In short, the potential indeed seems to be there on both sides but a little more effort is needed to offer more coherent platforms...