Exclusive: First Intel Cedar Trail benchmarks by VR-Zone.com



We're not sure how much life there's left in the netbook market, but considering that Intel is looking to offer some very affordable next gen Atom processors, its upcoming Cedar Trail processors might just be what the netbook market space needs to catch a second wind. VR-Zone can exclusively unveil the first benchmark figures for Intel's upcoming mobile Atom processors and although they're unlikely to blow anyone's mind, they're a huge improvement over the previous generation.

Look at graphics performance we can see that the Atom N2800 performs about three times as fast as the current Atom N570 which goes to show how much faster the new PowerVR graphics engine is compared to Intel's old GMA950 which was tweaked to become the equally poor performing GMA3150. In all fairness, we're looking at a GPU that's clocked over three times as fast as well, so we aren't exactly surprised here. The slower Atom N2600 doubles the graphics performance, or near enough at least, which makes sense as its GPU is only clocked twice as fast.



The only graphics metric is 3DMark 06, an out-dated benchmark that doesn't really say much about real world performance and it shows that Intel doesn't care too much about the 3D performance in the first place. It should also be noted that this is unlikely to be with the DirectX 10.1 drivers, as Intel is having enough of a hard time getting its DirectX 9 drivers certified by Microsoft.

Moving on CPU performance the new models don't have as much of a gap compared to the Atom N570, although the higher core clock of the N2800 puts it in a comfortable lead in all of the CPU tests as you can see from the slide above. Oddly enough, the Atom N2600 is falling behind in all but the 3DMark 06 CPU test, which is surprising as it's clocked at the same 1.66GHz as the Atom N570.

The question is if Intel's new Atom processors are good enough, as although Intel will have a more power efficient platform than AMD, Intel can't compete in terms of graphics performance so the company is now making the AMD play by saying its Atom processors are more power efficient than AMD's Bobcat based APUs. It's funny how quickly things can change, but then again this market space isn't exactly a huge money maker and Intel already has tie-ins with the embedded board makers and we can't see those guys jumping over to AMD overnight. Still, Intel has at least managed to add HDMI support to the Cedar Trail Atom's which must count for something, right?