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Intel Atom N550 Notebooks Intel has launched the latest version of their successful Atom processor, the N550. While the latest Intel Pineview Atom processors run at very low wattages, and allow very small form factor notebooks to be packaged around them, there has always been a fundamental issue: performance.
The new N550 looks to correct this, with the biggest change being a move to dual cores. The N550 carries over the same architectural benefits of the very popular, if sluggish, Pineview N450 including Hyper-Threading and 64-bit support. However, it adds on to that a second core, double the L2 Cache (1MB) and DDR3 RAM support. The core speed has dropped from 1.66GHz to 1.5GHz, presumably to keep the TDP down. The N550 is not the first dual-core Atom CPU Intel has made. They currently make a couple dual-core Atom processors, and in essence, this is the power binned netbook version of the D510. So the nettop market has had the D510—and newer D525 with DDR3 support—for a while, and even when Atom first launched there was the Atom 330.
While these CPUs are similar to the single-core Atom variants there are a few key changes. The reason these CPUs weren't used in netbooks—excepting a few ASUS models like the 1201N and the upcoming 1215PN—is the TDP and lack of power saving features. At 13W the 330 and D510 run too hot and consume too much power for practical implementation compared to the 5.5W N450.
Add on to that the lack of SpeedStep, so the CPU runs at a constant 1.6GHz/1.66GHz, and as we measured on the 1201N battery life takes a serious dive. The new N550 fits somewhere between the N450 and D525 at 8.5W, but Intel claims battery life will be unaffected over the N450 thanks to power savings elsewhere—i.e. The use of more power friendly DDR3 RAM compared to DDR2 RAM. It looks like RAM support is, which makes the 64-bit architecture a little less useful. Though bearing in mind these netbooks will probably ship with Windows 7 Starter, and the general type of work performed on netbooks, perhaps greater amounts of RAM aren’t required.
The processor is also produced with a 45nm lithography process, again a little strange as the Arrandale Core i3/5/7 processors that have been available from the start of the year brought 32nm to the notebook market. The other strange one is that the integrated graphics looks unchanged from the anemic GMA 3150, clocked at a rather miserly 200MHz. Again, this is probably not a big deal for the use of netbooks, but it does mean HD video content (i.e. HD YouTube) will continue to need something more than just the Intel IGP. So NVIDIA's Next Generation ION and Broadcom's CrystalHD should still be of use in Atom netbooks. Some early show that there is certainly a performance benefit from the dual-core upgrade. Intel claims the new CPU will perform much better with Flash and with multimedia websites like YouTube and Hulu.