To me less resources means very little until you actually compare what it is doing it is isn't doing the same as avast then I would expect it to use less resources.
There are many tricks to hide how much resources are being used, AVG used to do this by running some services are kernel mode and they were not recorded against AVG but shown a system usage.
So it isn't quite that easy to make a comparison on resource use.
As for faster, same thing faster at what, how deep a scan, what does it scan, etc. not easy to compare.
