Intel Atom Z510 vs Intel Atom Z540

The Intel Atom Z510 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 Z510 does not support HyperThreading and 64 Bit instructions.

The Intel Atom Z540 is a power saving netbook / MID single-core processor. Compared to the Atom N270, the Z540 supports Virtualization in hardware and got the Idle States and Demand Based Switching power saving functions. Futhermore, the Z540 is higher clocked but in contrary specified at a lower TDP rating.

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 Z540 is only compareable to a 1.3 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.