We found out the weak point of Atom: the CPU is great for Windows typing and surfing but rendering and encoding tends to be painfully slow. When we say painfully, we mean that it is slower than any Celeron 420 or even Celeron 220 in both encoding and rendering. Celeron 220 works at 1.2GHz and it still beats the Atom 1.6GHz in most of these tasks.

Rendering an image in Cinebench 10 was laughably slow, and two threads on the CPU don't really help a lot. So, now we know what the catch is with Atom. All multimedia instructions are cut off and apparantly this is what you need to do in order to save some power and make a 4W TDP CPU.

At the same time CPUz reports that Atom does have MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3, whatever that is; but we simply couldn't see that while encoding with Lame or rendering with Cinebench 10. We know that very few people will render anything on Atom notebooks or desktops; but still it is good to know the weak spots of this CPU and platform, and this certainly might be important for desktop Atom adopters. Due this weak point it seems Atom is not suited to playback HD-content, because there is no help from the IGP either.

Well you can't have it all, and that 4W TDP had to come with a price.