New Intel Atom Cedar trail chips show improvements

Monday, August 29th, 2011...10:28 pm

Intel’s Atom processors have always been designed as low power chips, made to offer long battery life and decent performance for basic computing tasks. They’re also low cost, making them ideal for the netbook market. But this emphasis on energy consumption rather than performance explains why there’s been so little change in the performance of netbook chips over the last 3 years. The differences in benchmark scores for the Intel Atom N270, N280, N450, and N455 processors are hardly noticeable.

However, is the last year, dual-core netbook chips such as the Intel Atom N550 and N570, with higher performance ontasks that can fully take advantage of multi-core processors. But 3D and HD graphics performance has been pretty stagnant… until now.

VR-Zone has published some of the first benchmarks of Intel’s upcoming Cedar Trail platform. The next-generation Intel Atom chips are designed for netbooks, and they score 2-3 times higher on the 3DMark06 benchmark than any Atom processor available today.