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Ever since more and more small formfactor “cheap” laptops started showing up (it seems the segment really got started by the EeePC, but lately the Cloudbook, the HP Compaq 2133 and the Kohjinsha E8 have sparked my interest) I have been wondering about the relative performance of the underlying platform.

There are tons of sites analyzing the performance of the high end chips of AMD and Intel (Phenom and Core 2). From Anandtech to Tom’s Hardware and many other sites. But there’s very little data to be found on the lower end chips that I mention here. Imagine my excitement when I found one at Tolly Group - but then I saw that the study was commissioned by Intel; that makes it a little harder to take it at face value…

But even after a lot of googling, this is the only benchmark based comparison that I was able to find. And given the CPUs that it tests (the same one as in the E8, a faster one than in the Cloudbook and a slower one than in the EeePC), it does seem at least somewhat fair to draw conclusions from it.

The summary of the the results is easy - the Intel Celeron beat the AMD Geode and Via C7 in all benchmarks: SPEC CPU 2000, PCMark 05 and SANDRA 2007. Again, take it with a grain of salt, given where this comes from, but it does seem to confirm what I have read so far about the perceived performance of these systems.

Oh, and just for the record - even running at the full 900 Mhz, the EeePC feels a bit slow. Hopefully the Gen2 system will use a newer Intel platform (Diamondville?) and be a bit faster. But unsurprisingly, there’s no publicly available performance data for that, yet.

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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?