Atom vs. Athlon -- AMD Wins!

Tom's Hardware pit the Intel Atom processor and a low-wattage Athlon processor against each other to perhaps surprising results. The site found that the 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+, with its 8 watt power draw, bests the 1.6GHz Atom 230 -- both in terms of performance and enery consumed. The comparison concludes that "The Achilles heel of the Intel system is its old system platform with the 945GC chipset, while AMD offers a more modern 780G platform". The author Bert Toepelt, further adds that the AMD platform was able to run fine without a fan. He notes that while the AMD chip requires more power than the Atom processor, AMD's system -- as a whole -- requires less energy both when idle and under load because of its chipset.

While such a platform would make for an ideal HTPC setup, the only negative is that the 780G chip powering the AMD platform is currently only available in the microATX; Intel is also present on the miniITX board.