First benchmarks of Atom CedarView-M CPUs

This fall Intel planned to launch several Atom microprocessors from Cedar Trail platform. New features of this platform are 32nm manufacturing technology, and beefed up on-chip graphics unit. VR-Zone published today one slide with benchmarks of Cedar Trail processors, that gives a rough performance estimate of the new platform. The slide depicts 5 Atom SKUs, tablet-oriented Z670, N450/N455 and N570 for netbooks, and upcoming N2600 and N2800 32nm chips with CedarView-M core. The most interesting from these CPUs are N570 and N2600, that have very similar characteristics: 1.66 and 1.6 GHz clock speed, 2 cores, 1 MB L2 cache, HyperThreading technology, and DDR3 memory support. Comparing these two models, we can easy determine what performance benefits we can expect from Cedar Trail Atoms.

According to 3DMark06 results, the 32nm N2600 microprocessor has considerably higher graphics performance, than the N570. The difference in the final score between processors is approximately 1.7x - 1.75x. If we take into account that the final score includes percentage of 3DMark06 CPU score, the difference in graphics performance is actually close to 2x.

Three non-graphics benchmarks, PCMark 2005 v1.2, SPECint 2000, and SPECfp 2000, show that the N2600 has a few percent slower performance, which closely correlates with slightly slower clock speed of the Atom N2600 model. In other words, the new CedarView-M core doesn't have any CPU performance advantages over the 45nm PineView core.

To summarize benchmark results, the N2600 and N2800 processors have almost identical CPU performance, and possibly 2 times faster graphics unit than 45nm Atoms, operating at the same core frequency. It's important to note that the Atom N2600 and N2800 models have about 60% and 25% lower Thermal Design Power, while having similar or better performance than the N570.