HD video playback

As you see, there's no diagram for this group of benchmarks, because there are no scores (yet). But it doesn't mean these benchmarks are uninteresting. So what numbers are these? They indicate CPU load during HD video playback (1920x1080, H.264) in listed players with DXVA enabled (GPU helps — hardware decoding) and disabled (GPU not used — software decoding). Then why are these numbers often higher than 100%? Let us explain how they are calculated.

A special utility produces two values: the duration of the process itself, and how much time CPU has spent on handling it (processor time). If there's one core involved, the second value cannot be higher than the first. But if there are two cores, it surely can. Say, a process was 5 minutes long, and one core spent 5 minutes on it while the other spent 2 minutes. So, the total is 7 minutes. Therefore, in this particular case, if Intel Atom's load is 400%, it means that all four cores were loaded at 100%. Same for both AMD processors — 200% stands for two cores loaded to the max.

So, what can we make of the results? Firstly, aside from any numbers, all processors except Athlon II X2 250u failed in software decoding. Numbers are not important in this case, because video playback was jumpy and frames were dropping. We could observe all that with the naked eye.

Hardware decoding results are more interesting. Let's start with GMA 3150. As you can see in the table, despite lacking support for H.264 hardware encoding, this graphics core did help in Media Player Classic Home Cinema somehow, reducing CPU load by half. VLC Player, on the other hand, could find no means of hardware decoding in GMA 3150 whatsoever.

NVIDIA Ion did much better, and both players could use GPU resources. VLC Player only loaded 44% of one processor core. This is a nice result, considering how fast Atom cores are in general.

Solutions from AMD did even better. Just don't forget that while Atom can afford 400% load (4 cores), competing processors can only have 200% (2 cores). Anyway, the lowest CPU load was demonstrated by Athlon II X2, even though Zacate features a better GPU.

Common application software

A classic case: Atom loses as much to Zacate as Zacate loses to Athlon II X2.

Java

Strangely enough, this diagram is similar to the previous, even though most common applications are single-threaded and SPECjvm 2008 handles multi-threading well. Intel Atoms could not be saved even by HT.

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