Atom is less powerful than Celeron, Intel's low-budget/low-power family. Plus, it will be throttled, to reduce power consumption/heat, like all mobile CPU... bu

Atom is less powerful than Celeron, Intel's low-budget/low-power family. Plus, it will be throttled, to reduce power consumption/heat, like all mobile CPU... but... it certainly does seem like a desktop-class CPU. It would be interesting to find the median power of a desktop CPU for each year; and the power delivered by a mobile CPU that's sustainable (i.e. without throttling/overheating - 2.33GHz is the "burst frequency"). Then, for example, you could say it's a "2003 desktop class". As a super-flawed estimate, the first time a PC CPU was available at or above 2.3GHz was in 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology (Opteron, AMD) But this Atom may be a bit better, because that was high-end, not median; not 64-bit; not using fast memory or other advances; and single core not quad. How much they offset the crippled architecture of Atom and throttling, I don't know. It also has 2MB cache; my median PC in 2006 had only 512KB cache... I'd guess it's around 2006-8 desktop class.