Until we see a little bit more on this story, we are going to file it under “rumors”, but it’s definitely worth mentioning and it seems to have legs. Fudzilla is reporting that Intel will be launching a dual-core Intel Atom-based CPU, dubbed the Atom 330, later this year (in the third quarter to be precise).
Like the current single-core Atom 230, it will be clocked at 1.6GHz, but will have twice the L2 cache (at 1MB, or as Fudzilla mentions, 2x512K since the memory/cache is not shared between the individual cores).
It will also still have the 533MHz frontside bus (FSB) and the TDP (Thermal Design Power) will be 8W, which is acceptable for netbooks / sub-notebooks – for comparison, the Intel Celeron M 353 that is in the Asus Eee PC has a TDP of 5W. I would consider that an acceptable trade-off, given the increased performance (some have complained about the Intel Atom in it’s single-core version in devices such as the MSI Wind U100).
We already know that this should be 64-bit/x68-64 as the article mentions, and that they will support hyper-threading.
Read: Fudzilla