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.

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7 replies on “Intel to launch dual core Atom chip for netbooks”

  1. as someone who has used all laptops from pentium 11 to centrino 2, i can say that there is no noticeable difference for most office programs. games – yes. that too – between oldies and newies. not between sister processors. for example centrino (original) centrino duo and centrino 2. theres absolutely no difference. what changes is the hard disk capacity and ram. so with the same hard disk and ram and other stuff like operating system etc ….. im sure that the difference in performance wont be significant. i dont care if ms word opens in 2.27 seconds or 2.64 seconds

  2. Brad, by your logic a Core i3 is no faster than a Core i7. Sure it has more cores and threads, but Flash doesn’t use them, so who cares, right?

    A dual core Atom is exactly 2X the speed of a single core Atom. No matter what your poorly written benchmark says.

    1. No, a dual core Atom chip is exactly as fast as two single core Atom chips.
      There’s a big difference. Your computer won’t boot much faster, web pages
      won’t load much faster, and most apps won’t launch faster if you have a dual
      core version of the same chip.

      The only time you’ll notice a difference is when you’re using software
      that’s specifically built to take advantage of multiple cores. But most apps
      that people run on a day to day basis aren’t.

      1. I’d beg to differ. I have a single core N270 in my Eee 901 and a dual core 330 in another computer. Both running stock Ubuntu, I can tell a huge difference. This is probably because I rarely do one thing at a time – I have a web browser, music player, gedit, file browser, and console open almost always, with a few other apps smattered throughout. There is definitely a huge difference. I feel like there is even a difference in Flash performance between the two as well, although that might just be perceived.

        It definitely feels A LOT faster in pretty much everything I do, but that’s just my experience.

  3. The best thing Intel has done for years (in my mind anyway)is the Atom.
    Low power and decent performance. I don’t see any point in a dual core atom unless in uses the same amount of power and costs the same.which I doubt it does. There are better options for more power and fairly low power use. Intel will probably mess up a good thing.

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