Originally posted on April 26, 2010 @ 2:41 am
It’s been a while since we’ve seen new Intel Atom processors hitting the market, and now we have the new Intel Atom N450 and the Atom N470 processors. How do these new Atom chips match up to each other?
The Atom N450 is clocked at 1.66GHz while the Atom N470 at 1.83GHz, so it’s pretty obvious that the N470 will beat the N450 in so many respects. Or will it?
Netbooked.net put both processors on a benchmark test, and he found that even though the N470 has a higher clock speed, there isn’t that much of a difference between the two processors.
Check out Liliputing’s analysis of the test:
While the N470 clearly has a faster clock speed, it’s not that much faster than the N450. And so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that when Peter ran several benchmarks on the two computers, the scores weren’t very far apart at all. The Lenovo S10-3s scored slightly higher on most tests, but actually lagged a tiny bit in the graphics department.
The N470 gets a Windows Experience score of 2.5 compared with 2.3 for the N450. But that’s out of 7. Long story short, in real world settings you’re probably not going to notice any real difference between these two chips. Neither is going to make your computer fly, but both should be good enough for basic computing tasks such as web surfing, editing documents, or watching standard definition (or even 720p) video.
Sure, if you have the choice between a computer with an Intel Atom N450 and N470 processor, the N470 might offer a slight performance boost. But it’s probably not enough to justify paying much more for that computer.
I’m quite disappointed in the 2.5 and 2.7 Windows Experience Score for the processors. But then, we’re talking about netbooks here, and we don’t expect computing miracles in this market segment.