Intel Atom N270 - How Fast is It?

Most netbooks come with Intel Atom processors, mainly because they are low power, portability-oriented process and the price is reasonable for the performance they give. If you want to get a mini laptop today, chances are you're getting a N270 with atoms, or a later spin-off the N450, so it makes sense to shed light on what these processors are capable of.

If you've ever tried netbook you agree with me that they are not the fastest computer around. They are not even a little faster when it comes to comparison with full-sized notebooks, but at 10, "the league they do pretty well. For the energy they use their computing capabilities are wonderful, in fact, die size of only 26 mm2, and Intel has made ​​sure it did not seem netbook processor aimed at the lower end of the expensive category.

The basic design idea was to make a processor that uses as little electricity as possible and to achieve that threw out everything that did not provide a 1% or more speed by 1% or less energy. To get rid of them than most floating-point calculations of parts, but they were able to keep Hyper-Threading.

What this means in plain English is that scientific applications, where the arbitrary precision numbers are involved, will be very slow, unfortunately, a lot of video and audio coding falls into this category as well. You will not be able to comfortably run Photoshop and 3D design applications come to mind as well. What you can do is to consume media content, though. Hyper Threading and other techniques make multi-task fairly painless, you will not notice the slow work when running the browser with multiple tabs. You can use MSN Live, Skype, your e-mail client and browser, without giving up anything on the user experience.

N270 is about half as powerful as a 3000 + Sempron processor, which is basically an Intel Celeron category, but that's okay, because while Atom has a 2.5W TDP, Mobile Sempron or Celeron for that matter, has a nominal power of 25 watts. It seems longer battery life as possible along with a refrigerator case and quieter operation.

There are better processors on the market today, but the N270 is still a popular choice in low-end segment of mini-notebooks. If you see one agrees with the N450, buying almost the same thing, only difference is that the graphics chip, the memory controller and peripheral controllers built into the processor. This makes the chip bigger and eat more battery, but as a whole, the computer uses less power for the performance of the N270.