Intel is still having some issues delivering enough Atom 230 processors to cover the long list of netbooks that have appeared over the last few months, but that hasn’t stopped Intel from preparing dual-core models of Atom. Atom 330 has already appeared at system builders and over at Guru3D they’ve gotten their hands on one of the first barebone platforms with Intel’s Atom 330 processor. The platform consists of an ECS P945GC motherboard with an Atom 330 CPU soldered to it.
A previous reported, Atom 330 is nothing but two Atom cores slapped together, which through Intel’s HyperThreading technology results in up to four parallel threads in Windows. Atom 330 should offer a significant boost in multithreaded environment, but it comes a t a price of power, double up to 8W!
Atom 330 is hardly a performance monster, but those hunting for a cheap PC should perhaps keep an eye out for this one as it is expected to cost around 75€, and should do just fine for browsing the web and performing simple office tasks. The lacking multithread support with today’s software might be the biggest problem these processors in Windows environments, but with dual cores and HyperThreading it should do fairly well anyway.
“Atom 330 dual-core itself then, two is always better than one. And that surely goes for the Atom 330 with it’s two logical cores running at 1.6 GHz. The Atom processor is a perfectly decent CPU for web browsing, email, showing friend’s your holiday snaps, listening to MP3s, watching DVDs etc. It doesn’t need any more performance and all that at 8 Watt … “
Check out the entire test of ECS Atom 330 Dual Core P945GC at Guru3D.com.
