VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review – Battle of the Tiny CPUs

Media encoding and WinRAR

Converting a video to WMV might not at first seem like a function for a processor like this – however if you plan on maybe using this machine for a DVR or HTPC then its ability to encode is still important.  For a function that usually takes about 250 seconds for modern Core 2 and Phenom processors, obviously waiting up to 1244 seconds (or over 20 minutes) seems like forever.  That being said, even in this multi-threaded benchmark the Intel Atom falls behind VIA’s Nano processor by about 17%.



A similar story was seen in our MP3 encoding test – even though the Intel Atom was able to run the multi-threaded version of the test and the Nano was relegated to just one thread, the Nano performed better by a considerable margin: 30%.