Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power

Performance

Across the board, thanks entirely to the integrated memory controller, Pine Trail is roughly 5 - 10% faster than the original Atom platform. The performance gain varies, but on average I’d say 5 - 10% is a reasonable expectation. It’s lower than I expected, but it looks like Atom’s performance is gated in more areas than just memory operations.

The integrated GMA 3150 feels like it handles Windows Aero a bit worse than Ion at higher resolutions, but I hear that may be a driver issue.

That 5 - 10% performance advantage does actually translate into something you can feel in real world usage. My Pine Trail system felt snappier than my older Atom machines. By no means was it fast, Atom is still slow after all, integrated memory controller or not.

Remember the comparison I did back in 2008:

At 1.6GHz the old single core Atom delivered the performance of roughly a 1.2GHz Pentium M. Thanks to the integrated memory controller I’d put the new Atom D410 at about the speed of a 1.4GHz Pentium M. The dual-core D510 is a bit more difficult to quantify. In single threaded use cases, the D510 still fits the bill as a 1.4GHz Pentium M, move to multithreaded and it’ll clearly have an advantage there.

Interacting with your PC, opening windows, launching apps, browsing the web, is generally all bound by the performance of a single thread. In those cases, you’re still looking at a platform that’s the equivalent of a low end notebook (not desktop) from 2004.

Atom has single threaded performance worse than a Pentium 4, but multithreaded FP/SSE performance can be much better on the dual core versions

The second core helps Atom not feel so slow when you’re trying to do two things at once. The second task doesn’t even have to be that CPU intensive, it could be something as simple as reading a document while you’re launching another application or opening another web page. Even in light multitasking, the second core helps.

On average, it’s still a sluggish platform. I’d take Pine Trail over the old Atom any day, but set your expectations accordingly: Atom can’t deliver the performance of a modern day machine, it’s best used as a secondary or tertiary PC.

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