Intel Atom Z500 vs Intel Atom Z530

Intel Atom Z500

The Intel Atom Z500 is a single core CPU for small MIDs, netbooks, internet devices. The performance is very low and therefore only some applications with low CPU demand may run fluently (e.g., email, simple word processing). The Z500 is specified with a TDP of only 0.65W but the US15W chipset needs 2.3W. 

The Atom Z500 supports HyperThreading to execute 2 Threads with the single processor core. However, 64 Bit instructions are not supported.

Furthermore, the Atom Z500 supports the following power saving features:

• C1/AutoHalt state
• C1/MWAIT state
• Enhanced HALT state
• Stop Grant state
• Enhanced Stop Grant state
• Sleep state Deep Sleep state
• Deeper Sleep state
• Enhanced Deeper Sleep state
• C5 state Deep Power-down technology
• Enhanced SpeedStep technology

Intel Atom Z530

The Intel Atom Z530 is a power saving netbook / MID single-core processor. Compared to the Atom N270, the Z530 supports Virtualization in hardware and got the Idle States and Demand Based Switching functions.

The Atom core was designed for a low power consumption and cheap production. The downside is the relative low performance per Watt (due to the in-order execution) compared to similar clocked Celeron processors, e.g.. Still the integrated Hyper-Threading (the operating system sees the CPU as a dual core CPU) decreases the penalty of the in-order execution a bit.

The performance of the Z530 is only compareable to a 1.2 GHz clocked Celeron M and therfore only sufficient for non demanding applications like Office or web surfing. HD videos, advanced photo editing, video cutting may not run fluently.