Intel's Atom processor sounds powerful and is selling by the dozen, often inside small notebooks called netbooks. The problem is that the architecture used for the Atom processor is fairly old and performance is nowhere near the slowest retail processors. Intel's Atom processor has problems with doing heavy work like games or playing high definition video. A lot of the blame has been put on Intel's own chipsets, with right, but the Atom processor is not without blame.
We have read numerous reports saying that NVIDIA's Ion platform will enable playback of 1080p Blu-ray movies with Intel's Atom processor. Something the Intel 945GSE chipset can't do. NVIDIA's integrated graphics circuit does much of the work and many 1080p movies plays pretty well, but in a recent article over at Anandtech it becomes clear that not even Ion can help Atom in some cases.
Transformers Blu-ray on Atom N270 dual-core with the Ion platform
An external Blu-ray player (the movie is not stored on the harddrive) puts some extra load on the processor and this is enough to break Atom when playing several of the latest and more high-quality movies. The conclusion is that you will need a minimum of dual-core Atom processor to do flawless playback of Blu-ray movies. Intel's Atom processor can't do miracles no matter how fast the graphics circuit may be.
:: NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Blu-ray Investigation
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Dual-core Atom a must to play Blu-ray, even with Ion
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