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Now that the Intel Atom processor has been officially released at IDF, the big question of course is about performance. And of course I was excited to see that LaptopMag had the first full review of the Classmate (CL2). But then, as I read the article, I was puzzled. They are talking about the performance as being “relatively weak” – but then mention an Intel Celeron M CPU – but the CL2 is based on the Intel Atom processor… what’s happening here? Update: what’s happening is that I am confused (as Steve correctly points out in the comment below). The second generation Classmate PC brings the 9-inch screen, but is still based on the Celeron M CPU – the third generation will be based on the Atom processor. Oops.

So far I haven’t found any real benchmarks on Atom-based systems. I played with the two on display at IDF, but that was rather inconclusive. The Linux system took forever to boot, but once it was up and running it felt reasonably fast. I never use XP, so I don’t have any way to compare the performance of the XP-based system.

When I talked to the folks in the booth about the slow boot time of the Linux installation I was told that this was an out-of-the-box distribution that hadn’t really been optimized for this system. Given that the Atom is an in-order processor (and that booting a computer quickly requires some serious customization of the specific Linux install) I figure that this doesn’t really allow for fair performance comparison, yet.

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