how is the AMD SempronTM II V160 (2.4GHz/0.5MB cache) chip for what im planing on doing? i can get a really good price on a machine with this chip set.
I'd have to check that chip to be absolutely sure (and I'll try to get to it later), but I'm pretty sure that is a real, modern out-of-order CPU, so it should be fine. Especially if the system comes with an AMD onboard GPU, which it almost certainly does.
The main problem with Atom and similar processors is that they are in-order processor designs. They do this to drastically cut the number of transistors needed to design the processor, thereby dramatically reducing leakage current (wasted power). Modern out-of-order CPUs require large, complex hardware on the CPUs that tries to predict future results in order to allow them to re-order the different instructions coming through into the most efficient sequence. Those complex "branch precictors" require lots of transistors, and those transistors all leak power. On modern process technology, leakage actually makes up more than half of the total power used by each transistor on the die, so leakage power is a big, juicy target when you're making a low-power CPU. In-order design solves that in a way by chopping off the whole branch predictor block and forcing the software to optimize for in-order execution.
This isn't necessarily a fundamental problem, but the problem is that the x86 instruction "language" (used by essentially all Windows-based machines) in particular isn't very well suited to in-order processing (especially at high, modern clockspeeds). If they had really designed an architecture and CPU core from the ground-up to achieve good performance without a branch predictor, an in-order chip would be fine (that's called ARM, though even they are switching to an out-of-order design with the next generation). But Intel is essentially recycling the same fundamental core design that they used in the original Pentium processors way back in 1993 and 1994 in the Atom, and just running them at very high clockspeeds possible from their modern manufacturing capabilities. That really holds them back.
A current generation Atom will get a little over 1/2 the performance of an identically-clocked Pentium 3 CPU in most relevant benchmarks. So, a 1.6GHz Atom is going to "feel" like a 800-900mHz Pentium 3 CPU. And that's just plain
old for running modern software, and especially for decoding H264-compressed video, and running things written in relatively-inefficient languages like Flash, Java, .NET, and Silverlight.
