Media encoding and WinRAR

VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - Processors 43

VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - Processors 44

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%.

VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - Processors 45


VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - Processors 46

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%.

VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - Processors 47

For our WinRAR testing I took a 600MB log file and compressed it with the highest level; the VIA Nano processor was able to complete the task well ahead of Intel’s Atom part turning in a time that was about 16% faster. 

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