Kevin and I have been saying for months that despite all the hype surrounding the Intel Atom processor and what folks have come to believe the processor will do running Vista that we didn’t think it would perform very well.  The Atom should run XP fine but the heavy requirements of Vista make us believe that the Atom doesn’t have a chance, especially with multi-tasking.  PC Pro has published what I believe is the first real-world benchmarks of the Atom running in a Vista-based PC and we’ll refrain from saying "told you so".  The experts at PC Pro ran the tests on the higher-end Atom, a 1.6 GHz processor on a system with 2 GB of RAM so the test was stacked in favor of the Atom.  How did it perform?  We’ll let PC Pro tell you:

And we wouldn’t disagree: inour benchmarks it performed pretty similarly to a Celeron-based Eee PC,with an overall score of 0.32 underlining the fact that this isprimarily an embedded device rather than a home PC processor.

Similarly, our Office test -which opens Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint simultaneously – tookthe Atom more than 20 minutes, despite its HyperThreading; even the VIAC7-D-based MSI Titan 700 managed that in less than 13 minutes. It’s worth remembering, though,that the Eee and MSI had XP installed, while our Atom tests were run inVista, which usually performs 5-10% slower.

It’s important to remember that the major advantage of the Atom is in low power consumption and the benchmarks showed that.  The Atom consumes less power than anything comparable so it should provide better battery life.  But when you’re trying to get some real work done on the Atom expect to sit and wait for stuff to happen.  The other advantage is in the low price but while the low-end Atom is expected to sell for $45 this high-end processor as tested is $160 so that advantage is negated quite a bit when you go for the "heavy" performance.