Even before the public launch, the Germany based website known as ComputerBase has already announced the initial benchmarking data for Intel Atom processor. Intel Atom is the official name just released last week to replace Silverthorne code name as a new brand under Intel processors’ family. The silicon, fabricated using 45-nanometer process technology is famous for its ultra low power targeted for MID (Mobile Internet Device) and UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC).

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As per the Super PI result published on the website, the Atom processor was tested at 1.6GHz for single threaded application. It was ranked second, from the last, only a bit faster than the old Pentium M (Tualatin) running at 1.13GHz frequency. However, it was not able to compete with Celeron M (Dothan) although the chip was only clocking at 900 MHz frequency.

The performance was not as good as expected by some of the board manufacturers. One of the reasons could be due to the pre production sample that is still not optimized for benchmarking performance. Another reason is the benchmarking test was actually running on single threaded application whereby Atom is famous for its Hyper threading capability that could stand a great advantage when processing parallel threading tasks. In view of these, the data could serve as good reference during early stage but we should expect more better benchmarking results to be available in short future.