Most netbooks come with Intel Atom processors, mainly because they are low consumption, portability geared processors, and the price is reasonable for the performance they give. If you want to get a mini laptop today, chances are you're getting one with N270 atom, or the more recent spin-off N450, so it makes sense to shed some light on what these processors are capable of.

If you've ever tried a netbook you may agree with me on that they're not the fastest computers around. They're not even slightly fast when it comes to comparison with full size notebooks, but in the 10" league they do fairly well. For the power they use their computing capabilities are wonderful in fact, the die size is just 26 mm2, and Intel made sure it's not the processor that makes a netbook aimed at the lower-end category expensive.

The basic design idea was to make a processor that uses as little electricity as possible, and to achieve that they threw out everything that didn't provide 1% or more speed for 1% or less power. It made them get rid of most of floating-point calculation parts, but they were able to keep Hyper-Threading.

What it means in plain English is that scientific applications, where arbitrary precision numbers are involved, are going to be very slow, sadly enough video and audio encoding falls into this category as well. You won't be able to run photoshop comfortably and 3D design applications are out of question as well. What you can do is consuming media content, though. Hyper threading and other techniques make multi-tasking fairly painless, you won't notice slow operation when running a browser with multiple tabs. You can use MSN Live, Skype, your E-Mail client and a browser without giving up anything on user experience.

The N270 is about half as powerful as a 3000+ Sempron processor, which is basically the Celeron category of AMD, but it's all right because while and Atom has 2.5W TDP, a mobile Sempron, or Celeron for that matter, has a rated power of 25 Watts. It makes longer battery life possible alongside with cooler casing and more quiet operation.

There are better processors on the market now, but N270 is still a popular choice in the low-end segment of mini notebooks. If you see one fit with N450, you're buying almost the same thing, the only difference is that the graphic chip, the memory controller and peripheral controllers are built into the processor. It makes the chip bigger and eat more battery, but as a whole the computer uses less power for the performance that an N270 would give.