Intel's Atom vs VIA's Nano: apples vs oranges, but still

We’re all hearing a lot about Intel’s Atom range of processors these days, likely because of the tiny laptop revolution (or whatever you want to call it). While VIA’s Nano is not competing directly with Atom as, say, GeForce does with Radeon, they are in the same ballpark and when it comes to low-power, general-purpose setups for things like tiny laptops or tablets, people are going to talk about Nano and Atom as competitors. HardOCP took a look at the two to see how they’d do in various situations.

With a bare bones setup (just a compatible mini motherboard and a gig of RAM) they compared the two in both synthetic and real-world applications. Intel’s been ruling the CPU roost these days so it came as a surprise to me when their touted Atom platform got its ass handed to it by pretty much every measure. Pure number crunching, desktop environment, video encoding, it got whupped pretty much all over town. These were essentially desktop setups and it’s difficult to extend the testing to the market, where demands on the systems are so varied. But it’s fun to know that Intel is getting schooled somewhere.