The guys over at Fudzilla have a scoop on a dual-core Atom processor coming out in the Fall of 2008. I thought the purpose of the Atom was to significantly lower power usage of a processor while still giving decent performance, isn't going dual-core kinda going against that? I guess a dual-core with minimal power usage will have uses as well.

As far as notebooks go I'm in the group of people who think that mobile computing should be useful, not powerful. I have a desktop at home for doing real work, and there's always remote desktop if I need something done on the road.

Here's the article from Fudzilla:

Intel plans to launch its first dual core Atom based CPU in Q3. We scored some more details and many of them were quite easy to guess. The new dual core Atom will end up branded as the Atom 330 and just as the single core Atom 230, the dual core CPU will end up at 1.6GHZ.

It has 1MB cache memory, which is twice as much as the single core Atom 230. We would suggest that Intel actually has 2x512KB L2 cache, as this cache is not shared between the cores.

The FSB stays at 533MHz and this is also a chipset limitation, but of course on some boards you will be able to overclock, at least the FSB.

The CPU and its two cores support four threads and the magnificent TDP stops at 8W which is definitely a great result for a dual core CPU. This is far better TDP than most of Intel mobile CPUs around.

The Atom also supports 64-bit processing, executive disable bit and it is halogen and led free.

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