Let's stress it some
The HEXUS.squash test uses the multi-core-threaded WinRAR engine to compress 205MB worth of files into a single, slightly smaller, file.
As you can see, it becomes a CPU-bound test for the most part, with the Mobile Core 2 Duo P8400 leading the way with a time of 84 seconds. The 2.1GHz Turion Ultra in the HP Puma notebook is a little way behind but still comfortably ahead of the MSI Wind, which is almost twice as slow.
The performance gap between the two full-powered mobile chips and the Atom 1.6GHz is markedly increased when looking at video encoding. The Atom N270 takes over 4x the time as a Mobile Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz CPU. An acceptable time for what Intel is proud to call a decent-performing CPU? Tell us what you think.
Much of the same in the HEXUS photo-editing test. At least we now know where Atom stacks up in CPU-intensive tasks.
Firing up Quake 4 at 1,024x600 for the MSI Wind and 1,024x768 - so higher load - for the other two laptops - we see performance compromised by the i945GE graphics.
Intel's own cutting-edge mobile IGP, X4500, does 3x better, but it's still put into the shade by the Radeon HD 3200 IGP in the M780G chipset contained in the HP tablet notebook.
Here's an interesting graph. It shows power-draw, taken at the mains, for the laptops when running the Quake 4 test, above.
We see that the Atom-powered notebook uses less than half the wattage of the other two systems, but also ships with a smaller battery, to keep the weight down to 1kg.
