Review: Intel Atom N280 vs N270 Benchmarks

Select netbooks in the market now feature the Intel Atom N280 processor instead of its precursor, the Atom N270. I have compared the N280 vs N270, clocked at 1.66GHz and 1.60GHz respectively.

Besides a clock speed increase of only 0.06GHz, the N280 features a faster front side bus. It’s 667MHz, which is up from 533MHz in the N270.

Other specs are the same. Both benchmarked CPUs have a core based on “Diamondville” 45nm chip and have 512KB of L2 cache. The CPUs support Hyper-Threading, SpeedStep, and Execute Disable Bit technologies, as well as MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instructions. Their maximal thermal design power is 2.5W (1, 2).

Intel Atom N280

Intel Atom N270

For this test, I have used a 10.1-inch Acer Aspire One D150 netbook with the Atom N280 vs an 8.9″ Aspire One A150 with the N270. These Intel 945 (i945GME) chipset-based netbooks have 1GB of DDR2 memory at 667MHz, with a latency of 4-4-4-12, and Intel’s Graphics Media Accelerator 950 integrated GPU. Both netbooks run Windows XP Home OS.

The D150 has a somewhat faster CPU, but the difference is marginal:

PC Mark 05 CPU Test (higher is better)
N280 – N270
1479 – 1444 PC Mark 05 CPU Points

SiSoft Sandra Processor Arithmetic & Multimedia (higher is better)
N280 – N270
4.06 – 3.89 (GIPS) Dhrystone ALU
3.46 – 3.33 (GFLOPS) Whetstone iSSE3
8.68 – 8.31 (MPixel/s) Int x8 iSSSE3
6.84 – 6.56 (MPixel/s) Float x4 iSSE2
1.27 – 1.22 (MPixel/s) Double x2 iSSE2

Hyper PI & wPrime (lower time is better)
N280 – N270
01m 31s – 01m 35s for 1M digits of PI calculated in Hyper PI
117.171 – 122.344 seconds for 32M in wPrime

As you can see, differences between the Intel Atom N280 and N270 are minor, which is expected since the CPUs are very similar. Even N280’s faster FSB doesn’t help much in benchmarks, as well as in real world use. I haven’t noticed any difference in responsiveness and speed when using the netbooks for web surfing, e-mail checking or watching Youtube videos.

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