core i3 vs Atom

[bulls96]

Is there a huge performance difference? Battery life difference?

Been struggling to decide if ill get the pro 3 or just get an 8 inch win8 tablet. I need a tablet more than a laptop. $1k is a bit much for me, It'd be nice though to have a laptop but I stilt rather bring a tablet around when I travel. I currently use a Surface RT. I do want to be able to run iTunes, some work appsand a little PhotoShop. Ive been using Remote desktopon RT to do this.

Thanks!

Sent from my Surface with Windows RT using Tapatalk

 

[anon(7900571)]

If you want great performance go for core i3 as they are lot more powerful and are made for laptops. But if you want great battery life , casual desktops apps like iTunes, office 2013 will work fine on an atom/bay trail processor. I have a lenovo flex 10 net book which has an intel quad core bay trail processor. Performance is great for browsing , iTunes , Microsoft office and some old desktop apps like VLC media player , etc.

 

[maj71303]

Is there a huge performance difference? Battery life difference?

Been struggling to decide if ill get the pro 3 or just get an 8 inch win8 tablet. I need a tablet more than a laptop. $1k is a bit much for me, It'd be nice though to have a laptop but I stilt rather bring a tablet around when I travel. I currently use a Surface RT. I do want to be able to run iTunes, some work appsand a little PhotoShop. Ive been using Remote desktopon RT to do this.

Thanks!

Sent from my Surface with Windows RT using Tapatalk

Hands down the i3 pretty much would destroy an Atom performance. The Atom is made for low cost embedded devices that don't need a lot of computing power. Because of this the Atom had better battery life because of these small task and any amount of work like Photoshop will bring it to it's knees pretty quick. The Pro 3 with an i3 will be enough for what you need, a blend of performance and battery life.

Is there a huge performance difference? Huge as the i3 is made for desktop work and the Atom is made for light task. I wouldn't try to even do Photoshop on an Atom.

Battery life difference? In favor of the Atom but not by much and the performance of the i3 would be worth it alone over the Atom.

IMO the i3 would be like night and day over an Atom or Surface RT with a Nvidia Tegra 4 or Snapdragon 800. Those just can't do what a desktop chip like the i3 can.

 

[Bora777]

I can't speak for the i3, but to give you an idea of the Atom, I have a Dell Venue 8 Pro which has decent performance with occasional stuttering. Basically I can actually run Photoshop (modest files with just a few layers), Adobe InDesign and Autodesk Sketchbook Designer simultaneously with a few IE tabs open and music playing and it will keep up admirably, but there are certain moments where it will lag with far less intensive programs running but, say, a lot of IE tabs and Bluetooth audio streaming.

Keep in mind this device has just 2GB of RAM.

 

[homeedition88]

I3 is better than Atom Cpu in a different way. Surface pro 3 core I3 cpu which is I3-4020Y has support new features like AVX2 and FMA should increase the performance in future applications. If we look at the Mobile Cpu benchmark list from notebookcheck.net I3 is faster than the most powerful Atom cpu. I3 supports virtualization features too.

 

[bulls96]

I've had netbook with atom before so I know how frustrating it can get. Is the fact that the sp3 had a high resolution display gonna make a difference in performance?

 

[onlysublime]

core i3 is better. but it's still a crappy CPU.

However, for most people the i3 is good enough. It is certainly more capable than Atom. You can actually use Photoshop with the i3. Yes, you can get it to run on Atom but it's a pretty terrible experience. Also, Atom is currently 32-bit and thus can't run software like Premiere.

Atom should be reserved for people on very strict budgets.

 

[Squachy]

an i3 will annihilate an Atom.