Intel Atom Z530 vs. Atom N270

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief March 7, 2009 · 1 min read

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After trying out the Sony Vaio P, I was curious whether there’s any performance difference between the Intel Atom Z530 and the Atom N270. Both chips run at 1.6GHz so I thought they’d have similar results with Super Pi.

Turns out my assumptions were wrong. Clock for clock, the Atom N270 beats the Z530 in Super Pi by as much as 35%. See chart below for the Super Pi results from 16k to 2M.

atom z530 vs n270
Numbers are in seconds so the lower the number, the faster the processor.

I can’t really account for the discrepancy in the results. Almost everything is similar between the Silverthorne and the Diamondville CPUs Â except maybe for the TDP (2.5W vs. 2W) and the package size (22x22mm vs.Â 13Ã—14mm). I’m still trying to figure this one out.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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25 Comments

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Jett Tayer · 16 years ago

Abe, what about Z550 vs N450 ?

Pabitra Baro · 16 years ago

So which one is better recently launched Z550 and N450?

Andy · 17 years ago

One difference is wattage. According to Intel’s website, the N270 draws .5 more wattage at 2.5W, where the Z530 runs at 2.0W. More power = better performance, correct?

But the clock speed and cache size remain the same. That’s strange there’s such a difference.

Itai · 17 years ago

So should i go with Z530?

myvaiop · 17 years ago

The problem when running benchmarks on the Sony VAIO P is it’s passive cooling (no fan for the CPU). When you put some heavy load onto the machine, e.g. running benchmarks over a longer period of time, the CPU Core temperature rises over a critical level (90Â° C) and the processor begins to throttle. Then it runs only with 800MHz instead of 1600Mhz.

See also page 21 of the Atom Z5xx datasheet:
http://download.intel.com/design/processor/datashts/319535.pdf

Improved IntelÂ® Thermal Monitor mode:
-When the on-die thermal sensor indicates that the die temperature is too high, the processor can automatically perform a transition to a lower frequency and voltage specified in a software programmable MSR.
-The processor waits for a fixed time period. If the die temperature is down to acceptable levels, an up transition to the previous frequency and voltage point occurs.
-An interrupt is generated for the up and down Intel Thermal Monitor transitions enabling better system level thermal management.

I got the same problem when running benchmarks on the VAIO P (SuperPI, CrystalMark09 etc.). Sometimes the results fluctuate more than 10% or more, so i searched for the problem. I observed the CPU-Speed during benchmarks and after some time the CPU throttles to 800MHz.

If you keep this in mind, you get nearly the same results in SuperPI as Atom N270 and N280 CPU. Here are my results:

16K – 0.828s
32K – 1.719s
64K – 3.703s
128K – 8.109s
256K – 19.046s
512K – 43.609s
1M – 97.438s
2M – 224.782s

Greetings from Thailand!
myvaiop

TechPinas · 17 years ago

Interesting. Up to 128k, the difference isn’t much actually.

I read in NotebookReview that Dell chose Z to run its netbooks because the chipset runs A LOT cooler than N (so they claim) and hence, works even with minimal fan speed.

Apparently and moreso in netbooks, laptop heat and fan noise are primary concerns. This graph shows that the compromise wasn’t much.

Thanks!