Laptop Thoughts: Double Your Pleasure With Intel's New Atom

"Intel first made mention of its upcoming dual-core Atom for netbooks back at Computex, and now it's making good on its promise with the ready-to-ship Atom N550. The chip operates at 1.5GHz, with 1MB of cache and support for DDR3 memory, and "similar" battery life to the Atom N450. Intel is billing it as a more "responsive" experience, which will make sense as a selling point to anyone who has attempted any serious multitasking on a netbook."

Netbooks helped breathe new life into the computing landscape. By offering small, lightweight laptops with "just enough" computing power, they opened up a whole new segment of the market. Times have changed, and computing requirements have gone up, albeit marginally. Mostly, it seems as if our expectations have grown, and Intel seems to have finally gotten the message. Dual core Atoms have existed for a while now, but they were more designed for nettops instead of netbooks, but the new N550 changes that. With dual-core Atom based netbooks, browsing Flash heavy pages or watching videos will be a bit snappier. Of course, the big question is whether dual-core Atoms are overkill, just like more powerful GPUs? I, for one, welcome out dual-core overlords.