1.6GHz Atom vs 850 MHz PIII

[Karsenman]

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I have Sony Vaio "netbook-sized" laptop. Even with an 850 MHz Pentium-III, 512MB RAM, and runs Windows XP. Today also the performance of it is excellent. But the battery, however, is now dead. I am looking about a Netbook for a new battery, and for the additional memory. I have heard one article saying that on HP Mini 311, that even the new low-power celeron will give you improvement in performance over Atom. So i want to make sure that 1.6GHz Atom be at least same fast or faster than the 850 MHz P3? Please tell me what should i do?? Am i going degrading performance?

[Fabian]

I would suggest you to think about future and life of netbook, so you go for Pentium dual core or Athlon which would be better for you. Because if you go with an Atom, it is a machine that already has been 8-9 years old performance level. And let assume you keeps it for even 4 years, it will be around 12 year old performance level, which would very bad choice. I have also heard that Atom cpu's are going to make many people restless with the performance of it.

[RoninBlade]

My suggestion would be Pentium 3 only. Because i have read, the Atom use very less power,but this makes it a less powerful at the same frequency. But main thing is the power usage which consider as big factor for the mobile products. I can conclude that, the Atom is best in lower power usage products whereas Pentium would be best in a more powerful processor. So, Atom can use for products like mobile (low power usage,longer battery life) and Pentium for products like desktop(a slightly more powerful CPU,maybe.

[deoWo]

According to me a 850 P3, will say as a copper mine because that was one of the most popular chips, which consist only at the most a 133MHz Front side bus, and 256KB of L2 Cache for the P3's. On other side, Atom chip at 533MHz front side, 512KB L2 Cache, and DUAL CORE, would not only compete, but destroy your P3 850. You will be fine with the netbook, as it will mostly come with faster RAM, and a faster and larger hard drive (most notebook drives are 5400 RPM, the one in your P3 notebook is probably 4200 or even less).

[Rawko]

My experience would say that do not buy an Atom if you can avoid it, because there are more better options at similar price points. The Atom is designed for the need to limit power consumption or to the detriment of performance. I would tell you to purchase Celeron, or Athlon, or Pentium Dual Core, or Athlon X2 or even P3. This all give better performers then atom. Hope you get solution to your problem from this.

[T.J.]

I can tell for sure that PIII is an out-of-order, super scalar processor. And Atom is in-order and scalar. Atom is an simple architecture, and the one of the compromises necessary was to decrease transistor count, price, and power consumption. According to this, single-core Atom is mostly faster than an 850 PIII. Another thing is that it upon what you are doing, though. Atom also has newer instruction sets than the PIII, so if s/w is optimized for SSE2, SSE3, etc. it will surely help. Also, applications that need alot of memory bandwidth will mostly perform better with the Atom for obvious reasons. I guess this is enough to make your mind about Atom and PIII.