Kai Schmerer at ZDnet has done a thorough comparison of two of the most used processors in netbooks: VIA Nano and Intel Atom.
Here are some of the highlights:
Intel manufactures the Atom using a 45-nanometre (nm) feature size, while VIA still uses 65nm technology. For this reason, the VIA Nano uses more power than Intel’s Atom
Speed wise, the VIA Nano out-performs the Intel Atom processor in almost all the fields
In the Internet browsing performance, the Intel Atom processor takes twice as much time when compared to the VIA Nano processor.
And power consumption-wise, the Intel Atom processor perfomed better than the VIA Nano processor.
Read the whole comparison here