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.
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 except maybe for the TDP (2.5W vs. 2W) and the package size (22x22mm vs. 13×14mm). I’m still trying to figure this one out.
The reason that these two processors are so far apart lies in the fact that that the Atom N270 uses Hyperthreading (or SMT if you like) and the Z530 doesn’t have that feature. As can be seen in other test of the N2xx series, the hypertreading feature will gain the processor up to 40% speed if enabled. If you disable HT in the BIOS, the results should be more matched.
I got 92s for 1M on my Acer Aspire One A110 – weird.
@ Darkstriker:
That might hold true for other benchmarks, but SuperPI only uses one core. HT or multiple cores won’t reduce SuperPI’s calculation time. I’ve seen a C2Q and C2D @ the same clock speeds bring forward identical results.
Wikipedia shows both chips having HyperThreading… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microprocessors#Atom_Z5xx_series_.28single-core.29
the z series has an internal system on-chip that clocks down the cpu when a certain temp is detected hence the longer it runs, the hotter it gets, the sooner it bogs down, even on systems with fans and cooling solutions.
Yuga must have a bad chip, I got 1 min 36 sec on Super PI 1M with my Z530 in my MSI Wind U110-031US
stock out of the box.
I’ll be adding more RAM and OCing with SetFSB this week to see what I can get out of it.