I was surfing and looking for some real data about Intel Atom, Core2duo and Pentium 4 comparison. Found nothing usefull, then I started my own benchmark.
Here I'm comparing three HW configurations. The test is aimed to estimate computing power of systems for backup-server use.

1. My DELL Latitude D630 ATG laptop, running Ubuntu

2. Intel D510MO motherboard, with Atom D510 1,6GHz CPU.

3. Celeron processor system with intel 865 chipset, some old server's board.

Cel2667.Linux version 2.6.27.7-smp (gcc version 4.2.4) #Slackware-12.1
Cel @ 2.667GHz / 0.25Mb
512+256Mb @ 400MHz

All the systems has SATA2 discs.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tasks for benchmark:

1. image conversions - 121 image ~2MPx

1.1. ::  
    convert image006.jpg -colorspace HSL -channel lightness -equalize \
        -colorspace RGB image006.jpg.png
1.2. ::  
    convert image024.jpg  -colorize 0,0,50  -noise 10 \
        -gamma 1,2 image024.jpg2.png

2. compile kernel

     (linux-2.6.37.3, all identical  default values only)

3. targz whole compiled kernel folder

        It makes almost 2Gb file.tar.gz

Test results:

                 hh:mm  00:30;           01:00;                 03:00

Testing notes:

Horizontal line values are relative values from Averag(results). Next line values - test duration in hours and minutes.
ImageMagick was the only application, which used full multithreading power. Results from Atom are impressive, it's just 50% of Dell's speed!

                 hh:mm  04:15;        01:30;                 00:45

Testing notes:

During kernel compilation only ONE of cores was used. Atom D510 has 2cores+2ht-cores, therefore it appears as having 4 cores, but practicaly, only one was used. T9300 has 2 cores (no HT). Fastest was Celeron! Why?!

                 hh:mm  00:30;             01:15;               03:20

Testing notes:

During targzipping mostly one core was used. Dell's (T9300) power is remarkable here, it's 2x faster than "celeron" and around 6 times faster, than Atom.

I'm thinking:

Might it be, that Celeron configuration kernel failed some compilation and became faster to finish?
This test is far away from perfectness, and specific testing might be needed to compare for each type of task - file serving, web, serving, mysql speed etc.

The results

I think, that it is remarkably good result for such dualcore Atom system, what consumes less than 30W of power.
If you might use bouth cores +2HT cores for tests No.2 and No.3, practically, D510 might be as fast, or even faster than Celeron @2.6GHz...
I like it :) !

2011-03-12