For the past years, Atom chips for netbooks have little or no preceptible difference in performance, and it looks like this is about to change with the new dual-core Atom N550 processor.
According to benchmarks done by folks from Notebook Italia, who managed to to spend a few minutes with a pre-release Asus netbook with an Atom N550 chip recently, the N550 is excellent in performing tasks that can take advantage of the chips multithreading capabilities.
The benchmark was conducted using the file compression app 7Zip's built-in benchmarking utility, and the results shows that the N550 was twice as fast as a 1.66 Intel Atom N450 processor, and a little faster than the current crop of dual-core Atom chips - the Atom 330 and D510.
It is also much faster than the Intel Core 2 Solo SU3300 processor, which is a chip that doesn't support hyperthreading.
We do have to take note that this is just one benchmark, but it does show that the Atom N550 will likely take the lead when it comes to running multiple applications simultaneously or running apps that are designed to take advantage of multiple threading capabilities.
Intel has shown with the Atom N550 that its finally able to provide improvements in performance of the Atom chip without compromising its excellent energy efficiency.
Source: TEST OF DUAL-CORE ATOM PROCESSOR N550
