Intel offers a series of single and dual core Atom processors — but so far the dual core chips have all been designed for nettops and other low power desktop computers. Sure, a few companies (we're looking at you, Asus) have crammed the Atom 330 desktop processor into notebooks. But Intel hasn't officially launched a dual core chip specifically designed for netbooks… yet.
But Intel CEO Paul Otellini says the company is preparing to launch a dual core Atom processor for netbooks during the second quarter of 2010.
The news doesn't come as much of a surprise. We'd heard rumors about a dual core netbook chip called the Atom n500 last month. But f you're expecting a huge performance boost from a dual core netbook chip, you'll probably be disappointed. Intel offers higher performance chips. They're part of the company's Core line of chips including the Core 2 Duo, and Core i3, i5, and i7 chips.
Atom processors are designed to be cheap and user little electricity — they're not really designed to be blazing fast high performance chips and while adding a second core will help with multitasking and may speed up some tasks which can take advantage of multiple cores, the truth is that the existing Intel Atom 330 chip isn't much faster than the Atom 230. I haven't had a chance to play with nettops using the Atom D410 and D510 processors yet, but I'd be surprised if there was a huge performance difference there.
Post from: Liliputing
Intel to launch dual core Atom chip for netbooks
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