NetbookTech

Here’s an interesting (and somewhat flawed or mislabeled) benchmark test over at CNET’s Crave.com. The website pitted three systems against one another. An ASUS Eee PC 1000HE with an Intel Atom processor vs a Samsung NC20 with a VIA Nano processor vs. the new HP Pavilion dv2 with the AMD Athlon Neo processor. Their goal – to establish how the netbook/ultra-portable processors compare against one another – a “CPU showdown” of sorts.

Their result? Not surprisingly, confusing and inconclusive. The Atom processor faired well in their “multitasking test”, while the Nano faired well on the Apple iTunes encoding test and finally, the Neo faired best in their Jalbum test.

This “processor showdown” was unfortunately flawed to the bone and realistically mislabeled. It would have been somewhat better to call this a system showdown between three different netbook/ultra-portable families – one involving the Intel netbook platform, one with a VIA netbook platform, and one with the AMD Neo platform. Comparing these systems was like comparing a Granny Smith Apple to a Red Delicious Apple to a McIntosh Apple. They’re all Apples but they vary in size, shape, texture, taste, etc. 

Folks who benchmark for a living (anandtech.com, techreport.com etc) will often try and isolate processor performance from the rest of the system. This means when they’re comparing one version of a Core 2 Duo vs a new version of the processor- they try and keep everything else the same. Same motherboard; same RAM; same Hard Drive etc etc. The Crave review pitted three very different systems with different guts against one another. There was no real way to isolate processor performance from the rest of the system components.

Ah yes.. the art of benchmarking..

In any case, what I find most interesting about this test is the relative poor showing of the Athlon Neo processor – not so much what the Atom or Nano did.. Makes me wish I could have three different systems to compare against!

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