Image processing

Photoshop

Even on a cheap desktop or "netbook," folks are going to want to edit their pictures. Here, once again, the Nano L2100 finishes well ahead of the Atom 230. This matters, too, in my book, since some Photoshop filters take time to apply. The Nano will surely offer a better user experience for image editing.

The Panorama Factory photo stitching
The Panorama Factory handles an increasingly popular image processing task: joining together multiple images to create a wide-aspect panorama. This task can require lots of memory and can be computationally intensive, so The Panorama Factory is multithreaded. I asked it to join four pictures, each eight megapixels, into a glorious panorama of the interior of Damage Labs. The program's timer function captures the amount of time needed to perform each stage of the panorama creation process. I've also added up the total operation time to give us an overall measure of performance.

The Atom 230 takes more than a minute longer than the Nano L2100 to stitch together our photo panorama—a clear win for Via. The flip side of the coin: You could nearly shave off another full minute by using a Pentium M 760, instead.