Intel Now Shipping New Dual Core Atom N550

[Marcus Yam]

Netbooks to get a little bit more capable thanks to an additional CPU core.

Intel Now Shipping New Dual Core Atom N550 : Read more

 

[cmartin011]

Oh Boy!!!!

 

[DjEaZy]

... is this chip x64 capable?

 

[welshmousepk]

Would have been nice to have not needed to google for the clockspeed.

anyways, this is pretty cool. hopefully we will se a nice 10 inch netbook with one of these and a 9400m. would make for a reasonable light gaming machine. considering how well i was able to get some stuff running on the single core atom N10j from asus, this could offer a nice boost.

 

[decode]

I'm waiting for bobcat, It sound's as if to be better than Atom, but only time will tell.

 

[insider3]

Waiting another year for the quads. It's bound to happen.

 

[Godfail]

[citation][nom]insider3[/nom]Waiting another year for the quads. It's bound to happen.[/citation]

Doubt it. The point of a netbook is efficiency, the point of a quad is power.

 

[cookoy]

is this chip x64 capable?

Yes according to Intel website. Seems to be a valid question. Wonder why people flag it down.

 

[wotan31]

What a pointless chip. The dual-core Atom 330 has been out since 2008. The 330 had a higher clock speed too. This "new" 550 is simply the 330 with a die-shrink, and a slower clock speed. So what? Old technology, no thanks. The reason Netbook vendors never used the 330, is that Microsoft didn't allow them to install Netbook or Tablet Edition of Windows on a dual-core processor. Microsoft demanded single-core only for the those editions, which means the OEM's would have had to use the much-more-expensive Home edition on a dual-core netbook. The whole situation is stupid.

 

[Aragorn]

The 330 used too much power for a net book. They were used in Nettops with ultra cheap windows.

 

[Dkz]

I think they should focus a bit more on the chip-set to enhance it's multimedia capabilities.
I'm not talking about games.. for the easy jumpers out there..

 

[brandonjclark]

I've been using an Atom 330 Dual Core in my lightweight home server for over a year now. It works great as an SSH and File server, all the while sucking less than 50w.

 

[jaydice]

A. Atoms have a huge low application for low end markets such as Africa and 3rd world countries. So yeah they don't offer much that can't be accomplished here in the USA because you have electrical outlets every 50 feet here.
B. These are not old technology chips, they deliver the performance of a chip a few years old, but at a power cost that allows them to run on smaller batteries for many more hours than current power hungry chips.
C. The future of CPU hardware is redundant execution cores, not clock speed. In five years a CPU with 128 cores running at 50mhz will destroy a cpu of today with 2 cores that pumps out 1.8ghz.

 

[bobusboy]

[citation][nom]Godfail[/nom]Doubt it. The point of a netbook is efficiency, the point of a quad is power.[/citation]


Implying there wont be an advance in technology which makes quad core processors more efficent and suited to the task.

 

[7amood]

guys... sorry to disappoint u but obviously it is atom.
I don't expect it to exceed 20% performance over the last atom.
If it gained 15% performance... I would be really happy.

You should already know that Intel like to take it slow on their products and bleed the money out of them until... well... until there is profit, profit, and more profit.

Think about it...
Couldn't they come up with a dual chip 1 or 2 years ago??
Was it difficult for them to produce a dual core chip with low power requirements??

 

[stevelord]

The Atoms stink for power. They barely handle a low end game like Bookworm.

 

[Guest]

L335 anyone? I've had the amd l335 in my netbook for quite awhile now, welcome to party intel (just a little late)!

 

[w3k3m]

[citation][nom]jaydice[/nom]In five years a CPU with 128 cores running at 50mhz will destroy a cpu of today with 2 cores that pumps out 1.8ghz.[/citation]
What use would that make, if software won't follow ? Multicore programming is not a trivial thing, and lot of applications wouldn't even get any benefit out of it. We can see it even today, very few applications see linear performance increase with multicore CPUs.

Talking about Atom, N550 has only 1,5W lower TDP then e.g. Dual-Core Intel SU4100 which is some "real" cpu. It may be cheaper, but it's still simply too lame to be useful for anything but simplest applications.

 

[wildwell]

.... as the 'notebooks' slowly die away...

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]DjEaZy[/nom]... is this chip x64 capable?[/citation]
The Atom processor is 64 bit capable,only you won't get any benefit with it, as the memory controller of the N550 only allows for a single channel of 2GB DDR memory at max.
[citation][nom]wotan31[/nom]What a pointless chip. The dual-core Atom 330 has been out since 2008. The 330 had a higher clock speed too. This "new" 550 is simply the 330 with a die-shrink, and a slower clock speed. So what? Old technology, no thanks. The reason Netbook vendors never used the 330, is that Microsoft didn't allow them to install Netbook or Tablet Edition of Windows on a dual-core processor. Microsoft demanded single-core only for the those editions, which means the OEM's would have had to use the much-more-expensive Home edition on a dual-core netbook. The whole situation is stupid.[/citation]
The N550 is a lot different than the N330, in that it has a graphics and memory controller onboard. The N330 needed a GMA chip.
And the reason why no netbook manufacturer used the N330 is because the N330 + GMA950 thermal envelope would be greater than a undervolted or ULV dualcore chip. Not only that, but the N330 was more expensive than the N280, and the performance was only marginally faster; not worth losing a couple of hours of battery life for.
So far, as performance goes, you probably will be able to overclock the N550 quite a bit from it's standard 1,5Ghz. The 100Mhz lower clock speed of the CPU does not significantly degrade performance for singlethreaded apps (at worst by 7%), but for multi threaded apps, you'll see a boost of about 180% or more.
Optimized multi threaded apps will see a near boost of 2x here!

And for those who completely dis the N550 you can always go for more expensive single core netbooks from AMD, only I prefer Intel over AMD in chipset anytime.
If only Intel would allow AMD and NVIDIA to create a good energy efficient graphics card. I think the integrated graphics chip is doing a lot of bad to the netbook.
A N550 is powerful enough to run simple games like PSU at resolutions of 1024x768 or 1024x600 if they only where equipped with a better than an intel graphics chip!

 

[someguynamedmatt]

[citation][nom]decode[/nom]I'm waiting for bobcat, It sound's as if to be better than Atom, but only time will tell.[/citation]

I love how Bobcat's TDP is listed as "

 

[senshu]

[citation][nom]wotan31[/nom]What a pointless chip. The dual-core Atom 330 has been out since 2008. The 330 had a higher clock speed too. This "new" 550 is simply the 330 with a die-shrink, and a slower clock speed. So what? Old technology, no thanks. The reason Netbook vendors never used the 330, is that Microsoft didn't allow them to install Netbook or Tablet Edition of Windows on a dual-core processor. Microsoft demanded single-core only for the those editions, which means the OEM's would have had to use the much-more-expensive Home edition on a dual-core netbook. The whole situation is stupid.[/citation]

Yeah, it's downright absurd.

http://www.amazon.com/Seashell-1201N-PU17-BK-12-1-Inch-Black-Netbook/dp/B002ZLOR56

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]Godfail[/nom]Doubt it. The point of a netbook is efficiency, the point of a quad is power.[/citation]

Not so much these days. They have low power quads for laptops that fall into the 55w TDP range now and I am sure both Intel and AMD will have even lower version.

DO to one of those what they did to Atom (strip it of a lot of things, add a few and optimize) and you could have a quad Atom. Especially with the 32nm process.

[citation][nom]decode[/nom]I'm waiting for bobcat, It sound's as if to be better than Atom, but only time will tell.[/citation]

Unless Bobcat is designed a lot like Atom and is made specifically for the Netbook market, I doubt it will perform betetr within the same power envelope that Atom is hiting.

Hell a Pentium 4 can outperform a Atom in some areas but the difference is a 8w TDP vs a 100w+ TDP.

 

[HavoCnMe]

Replace the PS3 chips with these......

 

[liquidsnake718]

WHat are the specs, I currently have a netbook with an N330, which is basically a dual core 1.6ghz atom. I assume this will be a 1.66(.6mzh more yay!) Maybe if ppl are lucky a 1.8ghz dual core?!?