Atom 330 Dual Core To Kick Up Performance On Netbooks?

Intel now has a dual core for their energy efficient line of Atom processors. These light weight power stingy processors were originally designed for the new netbook computers. Now Intel is raising the bar by adding a dual core to the line up. These dual cores still are power efficient but will add some extra power to the mini laptops.

Over at Tom’s Hardware they state:

Intel’s Atom 330 dual-core is a logical evolution of the Atom 230 processor, as it can be assembled rather efficiently and is capable of almost doubling computing power. At the same time, the platform TDP increases by only 4 W, from 29.5 W to 33.5 W. This sounds reasonable, but the performance gains for the Atom dual-core versus the single-core were rather disappointing, at least in our test suite.

This is surprising since it was hoped that a dual core Atom would have the power to run Vista. That does not seem to be the case. A stripped down version of Windows 7 for mini laptops aka netbooks is being planned by Microsoft.

Comments welcome.

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