Dual-core Atom 330 benchmarked

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

The big arrival in the Labs yesterday was a barebones PC chassis from Shuttle, with something very special sitting inside: the very first dual-core Atom processor we’ve seen. The original Atom has been at the heart of the huge shake-up in the laptop industry over the past year, with the vast majority of the big guns opting for Intel in their netbooks. If the new dual-core model can live up to the hype it has the potential to trigger a whole new wave of more powerful netbooks.

Called the Intel Atom 330, it runs at the same 1.6GHz frequency as its single-core predecessors, with a 533MHz FSB. With two cores and support for Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, it appears to the system as four cores (as shown right). Being a desktop part, it comes soldered to an improved mini-ITX motherboard, now with a single DDR2-667 slot, Gigabit Ethernet and six-channel audio to go with the usual array of inputs and outputs.

We used a 7,200rpm SATA hard disk and 1GB of DDR2 to get our test rig set up, slapping on a fresh XP SP3 install to best compare the Atom 330 to the existing netbooks that will make up its primary competition. After installing all the drivers and running Windows update we installed our benchmark suite and set it to work overnight. (more…)