Hasta La Gadget!

For a long time, Intel’s Atom CPU ruled the mini-laptop universe, powering Netbooks from Asus, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo and others. After all — who wouldn’t want an inexpensive processor capable of powering an almost-pocket-sized laptop? Especially one perfectly suited of handling basic coffee shop chores such as Web surfing, e-mailing, or blogging.

But when you’re on top, everyone else wants a piece of your action. Two new potential Atom-killers have launched recently, each looking to steal some marketshare from Intel with variations on the Netbook theme. The contenders, in brief, are:

Intel Atom
The smallest processor currently made by Intel, the Atom is found in a majority of Netbook-style laptops. The most common versions are the Atom N270 (1.6GHz) and Atom N280 (1.66GHz), and popular Atom-powered systems include the Asus Eee PC 1000HE and Acer Aspire One AOD150.

AMD Athlon Neo
Intended as a step up from Atom-style Netbook processors, AMD’s Athlon Neo will be seen in ultrathin laptops such as the new HP Pavilion dv2. That particular system has a 1.6GHz Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU and a 12-inch display.

Via Nano
Chip maker Via has replaced its older low-power CPU, the C7-M, with the new Nano, specifically designed for Netbooks. The 1.3GHz Nano U2350 was first seen in the Samsung NC20 Netbook.

So, how did these CPUs fare when pitted against each other? To start with, it’s important to note that these are different Netbook-style systems from different vendors, so this is not an exact comparison — but it’s similar to the choices you’ll face when shopping for a low-cost, low-power laptop.

As one might expect, there’s no clear winner. When we sampled three laptops, one with each processor, the system with the Intel Atom was fastest in our multitasking test (but none of these single-core systems were particular adept at this task), but the one with the Athlon Neo was the fastest in one of our single-application tests (in this case, our iTunes encoding test), while the Netbook with the Via Nano was fastest in another single-app test using Jalbum, a photo program we sometimes use in place of Photoshop for low-power or Linux-based systems.

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