Acer Aspire One D255 Netbook with Dual Core Atom N550 Reviews
The Intel Atom N550 sports two cores, clocked at 1.5 GHz, with 512KB L2 cache each, and supports hyper threading, which results in four threads or virtual cores. It isn't the first dual core Intel Atom, albeit the first intended for netbooks. Both previous models, named 330 and D525, are designed for desktops and so called nettops. This didn't and doesn't stop Asus to build a few netbooks around them. In my opinion with little success.
Adding a second core improves responsiveness and general desktop performance, but it does not solve the main problem of the relatively slow Intel Atom. In fact performance is worse if an application isn't multi-threaded, due to each core being clocked a bit lower than current single core Intel Atoms. Intel tackled this problem in their "i" processors by adding Turbo Boost, which progressively overclocks a core depending on core usage and a few other parameters. It is very unlikely such a complex feature can ever be added to a simple and low cost processor like the Intel Atom.
A prominent example of a single-threaded application is Adobe Flash. Mozilla Firefox is another. There are many more. Still, a slight decrease in single-threaded performance is a welcome trade-off for a massive increase in multi-threaded performance.
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