Benchmarks:

Since this sample was not overheating, the Nano could do the FPU/SSE tests faster than Atom, but hyper-threading gives Atom an advantage to use its full potential on an overall perspective. Even a dual-core Atom can't beat VIA's Nano in this test. While we could reduce memory latencies on the Atom platforms, we could not do so on the VIA platform, because the BIOS has no settings to improve memory settings; but VIA runs with 667MHz DDR2 memory with CL5-5-5-18, while Atom supports only 533MHz with reduced latencies CL4-3-3-11, so the memory speed is quite matched.

Nano L2100 1.80GHz:

Atom 230 1.60GHz with Hyperthreading:

Atom 330 dual-core 1.60GHz:

Sisoft Sandra XII benchmark can give you a better impression.



As you can see, VIA is about 1.8x faster compared to the single-core Atom, but the dual-core is ahead by a big margin. It is still quite impressive for VIA Nano, a CPU that doesn't support hyper-hreading, can beat an Atom hyper-threading CPU.

While the Atom platform is stripped of any useful features, VIA features a PCIe x16 slot and using a HD3870 we can achieve stuff like that:

Of course that was just for fun, we don't think anyone will consider such a platform for gaming, but you see it's possible, even if the CPU score in 3DMark2006 is ridiculously low.