AMD acts, Intel reacts: Atom Dual-Core
So on my last blog post I mentioned how AMD isn’t sleeping, and how it had released a low-power version of their Athlon64 CPU, the 2000+ to go head-to-head with Intel’s Atom processor. Well as it turns out, Intel certainly hadn’t given its last word on the subject.
Perhaps in the light of AMD’s move on the low-end market, Intel decided that the release of the dual-core version of the Atom processor, the Atom 330, will occur sooner than expected.
Our sources tell us that this chip will run at the frequency of 1.6Ghz and it will have a total L2 cache of 1Mb (512Kb per core) and it will run on the same 533Mhz bus as its single-core counterpart (N270). It is expected that the Atom 330 will be significantly faster than the Atom 230 which was trampled by Via’s Nano according to a review by Ars Technica.
It is also worth mentioning that both cores on Atom 330 will have the HyperThreading technology and as a result, the operating system will have 4 virtual cores at its disposal. It needs to be noted that this HT technology was dropped in the Core platform and it’s now being brought back to life on both the Atom and Nehalem architectures. Rumour went that this technology was dropped because it was ineffective and in some cases it would even draw more power than a dual-CPU solution, so we can only hope that Intel knows what they are doing.
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