This is no apples to apples comparison here. The two products we're pitting against each other belong in different market segments, with Intel’s latest Pinetrail-based Atom platform going up against Core i3. Atom solutions are meant to be cheap and small, while Core i3 is a fully featured and far more powerful processor for desktops.
Still, because both are aimed at the value segment of the market, it's understandably easy to confuse their roles and capabilities. This review should make it clear just how dissimilar these two chips really are.
Plenty of PC buyers are looking for versatile, low-cost PC solutions. Such systems have to deliver adequate performance and should not require more power than necessary. It's also important to point out that we’re not focusing on performance or power consumption alone, but on balancing performance, power, and cost together.
Atom vs. Core
With Atom-based nettops and netbooks available for only a few hundred dollars, Atom is clearly cost-effective and power-conscious. Both attributes are great, and they enable Intel to address new markets sensitive to even lower price points, such as emerging countries. But then, Atom was never meant to be a strong performer. Consequently, it's not a great choice for anyone who does more on his or her PC than write emails and surf the Web. Frankly, Atom can't even beat an old Pentium 4 on performance.
Intel’s desktop processor lineup also requires a critical view. Although today's Core offerings deliver higher performance, lower power consumption, and thus, much improved efficiency over their Core 2 predecessors (as well as the AMD competition), Intel's mainstream chips carry higher overall costs. Whether we're talking about the processor, chipset, or platform, the full range of products, from Core i3 to Core i7, is consistently more expensive than AMD’s portfolio.
Atomic Fission
Our 2008 article Core 2 Nukes Atom on the Desktop compared an Atom 230 against a very basic Core 2 Duo E7200. We found that the system idle power of a mainstream Core 2 Duo system was quite similar to an Atom system’s power requirements. However, power consumption has to relate to performance, because a slow, low-power system might require much more power to complete intensive workloads if it needs more time to finish the job, too. Only a few months later, we updated our comparison and put the dual-core Atom 330 against the same Core 2 Duo platform. It did better, but even the dual-core Atom still trailed in the distance.
Why is This Shootout Important?
Style is a great persuader, and the attractive cost of many Atom solutions might lure the uninformed. Many Atom systems can't even play HD content without stuttering or responsively multitask while decompressing a ZIP file. Users who care about cost, power, and performance should read on.
Let's look at overall efficiency defined in performance per watt-hours of power used.
The runtime needed to complete workloads differs considerably. The Core i3-530 took 36 minutes to complete our tasks. Our Atom D510 required two hours and 16 minutes, and the older Atom 230 system finished after three hours and 45 minutes. These differences are clearly more than cosmetic.
The average power required during the efficiency test was almost twice as high on the Core i3 than on the Atom D510.
The total power required for the entire workload (single- and multi-threaded applications) is lowest on the Core i3 machine.
Here is the overall result: Atom D510 almost doubles power efficiency (performance per watt-hours) when compared to the Atom 230 thanks to the fact that it offers more performance and two cores at decreased power consumption. But the Core i3-530 again provides almost twice the performance per watt-hours than the Atom D510.
A picture can convey a thousand words; this one conveys thousands of seconds. Our power diagram shows clearly that the Core i3-530 requires the most power when at work, but it finishes hours earlier.
Before talking about the results and implications for system buyers, I would like to reiterate that we compared two different worlds in this article. Atom was designed for nettops and netbooks, emerging markets, and low-cost system environments. Core i3 is the entry-level product of Intel’s desktop processor lineup, and both more expensive and powerful than the Atom. An Atom D510 motherboard with onboard processor typically costs $70 to $100, while this is the minimum cost for an H55 motherboard. Add another $115 and you'll have comparable base configs, but you're facing at least twice the cost for a Core i3 motherboard and processor.
Atom D510 Pinetrail has improved a lot over Diamondville. It is still low on power, low on cost – but also low on performance and on efficiency.Atom D510 Pinetrail has improved a lot over Diamondville. It is still low on power, low on cost – but also low on performance and on efficiency.
At this point, you have to add memory, hard drive, case, power supply, and optical drive components, which all favor the Core i3 system because the relative price difference to an Atom system shrinks as the absolute cost increases. This is our key point: you can either go for a nettop system starting at $300, or you can consider an entry-level Core i3 machine. The latter will cost more, but this article proves that the additional value is extremely significant.
Our H55 test system with Core i3-530 was many times faster and much more efficient than the Atoms.
If you’re looking for a convenient solution to occasionally process email, documents, simple spreadsheets, browse the Web, or watch standard-def video, then there's nothing wrong with an Atom system. But we recommend staying away from Atom if you have the slightest expectations for how systems should perform, if you’re impatient, or if you regularly run workloads through your system.
Specific examples of such workloads would include HD video playback, all sorts of audio and video conversion, encoding, transcoding, file archiving, image or audio editing, and so on. You get the point. If this is the case, Pinetrail turns into Paintrail. Get many times better performance and save significant time with a real PC and boost power efficiency along the way.
