Atom 330 makes its debut
Early bird catches the sample
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?
L'Inq
Guru
of 3D
Comments
Atom 330 Dual Core
Well I just got my Dell mini 9 and I just sold it! I will wait till the Dual Core hits the market to get another one!Been Waiting
The dual core atom is why I haven't bought a nettop yet, and probably why prices are dropping once again.Sample?
You only have an engineering sample? Was this article written a month ago?The Atom 330's are in stock and for sale in Canada now.
I've got one embedded on an Intel mini-ITX board that will be in my hands monday or tuesday.
... Think HP Mediasmart windows home server ... except with twice the hard drive, 4x the ram, better CPU, for about 20% less cash.
The problem is the chipset
The single core Atom systems were already limited by their single channel 533MHz RAM & 4 year old shared memory gfx chip.The other big complaint was battery life. Dual core makes that worse.
What they should have done is system on a chip.
I said wait...
I did. I said wait until Christmas and there will be lots of models to choose from.You haven't seen anything yet.
??
why didn´t you just give it back ?? :PAtom 330 Dual Core
Still have my eeePC 4g, still plays movies, games, web/email 3hr battery life. Still only cost me $350 almost one year ago. I need a dualcore netbook for uhhhh.....Netbook Impact
There will be no for seeable impact other then a few people holding off for the Atom N370 which I haven't seen a single announcement about yet. The Atom 330 is purely a desktop chip. :)This chip also has interested applications as a tiny Linux server (Home Server, NAS, etc), the Atom 230 wasn't that bad under linux :)