THE DUAL-CORE brother to Intel’s Atom lives and breathes as we speak. The Guru of 3D somehow landed an engineering sample from ECS and had some time to run basic benchmarks on the CPU. If you thought the original Atom was slow, then this one's only half as slow.
The Atom 330 clocks at 1.6GHz, but with two of everything, two cores, two caches and draws just 8w. The FSB is still 533MHz (and so is the memory controller), though bears and the same weak FPU as its single-core predecessor. Naturally you get two cores, plus two logical cores do make things go along a bit faster…
ECS had little room for movement, considering this is a DTX-sized motherboard with a 945GC chipset. One DIMM slot, no PCIe expansion slots… uhm… nothing much really. But the slimmed-down system does what it needs to do at just 55 watts under load. That’s quite an accomplishment but on a desktop a user might be happier getting their 780G+4850e fix…
We wonder, though, what’ll happen to the netbook market once the Atom 330 hits the market in force? Kinda makes you wonder why you’d buy a kneetop right now and not wait for the 330 which, by all indications, costs about the same?
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