Over on Netbookio today there was a fabulous netbook review on the new dual core processors. It’s been a while since Intel has come up with anything drastically new in regards to netbook processors. Since the launch of the Intel® Atom™ back in 2008, Intel has shipped more than 70 million netbook chips with the only real revision being the introduction of the Pineview architecture in December last year.
On August 23rd 2010, Intel Corporation announced that their long awaited dual-core netbook processor will be hitting the shelves between now and the end of the year. The new Intel® Atom™ N550 should make the whole netbook experience much smoother and stress free with its improved handling of services such as YouTube and Hulu whose 720p video playback posed problems to the older netbooks due to high system requirements.
It won’t only be the chip getting a boost from the new technology though; the new N550 will also support a higher performance DDR3 memory. The new performance increase is claimed to have little to no difference in regards to battery life compared to the older N450 chip due to its slightly lower 1.5GHz clock speed. Over time the Intel® Atom™ N550 will eventually replace the less battery efficient Celeron and Pentium chips previously installed in older, larger netbooks. Of course, even with these improvements, it won’t turn your netbook into a desktop replacement but there is certainly a place for this kind of computer in today’s society.
Intel have announced that initially Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI and Toshiba will all come with the new Intel® Atom™ N550, meaning there will be a wide array of different prices creating an option for all budgets.