Intel’s Atom CPU has all of the makings of a miracle little chip. It has carried the netbook industry on its shoulders with its “powerful-enough” processing and low-power requirements making it the perfect match for portable computers.

That should be enough for anyone but they have bigger plans. HardwareZone has a look at the Intel D945GCLF2 mini-ITX motherboard with the built-in dual-core Atom 330 CPU. Here’s a look at how it fared:

Moving on to PCMark Vantage, we directly compared the Intel D945GCLF2
against a typical Atom powered machine like the Gigabyte M912. With the
exception of the hard drive and the dual-core nature of the D945GCLF2
kit, the two systems were practically identical in hardware
configuration. As expected, the results favored the Intel D945GCLF2
system, though the 14% gap between the two in the overall PCMark suite
was actually not as huge as the differences in the other segments.

A nice computing platform for those areas where you can’t exactly fit a tower PC, or even a small form factor machine, it’s also great for the environment.

With all of the hub-bub surrounding Intel and AMD’s high end chips you may be shocked to find out that there are still those that may prefer a dual-core CPU of the Core 2 era, especially on the enthusiast front. MADSHRIMPS has a look at the Core 2 Duo E7400 and E8600 and finds out just how much of an effect cache amounts plays in performance benchmarks. Here’s a tidbit:

The main objective of this article is to find out if the cache is
really worth the premium price. The FSB difference between both CPU’s
can be corrected by running a small OC. For those that do not want to
touch any of the bios settings, testing will be also conducted at the
following speed : 10 X 266FSB = 2.66Ghz (so basically at E7300 speeds).
Second test will be done at E8600 speed : 10 X 333FSB = 3.33Ghz. Most
enthusiasts run these CPU’s daily at 4ghz or higher. I opted for 2
different FSB speeds ( 10 x 400 and 8 x 500 ) This approach was chosen
to determine if the Level 2 cache gets any benefits from a higher FSB
and secondly to see if there’s a better scaling in favour of the E8600
with its larger cache.

Both can be, potentially, overclocked to high clock rates so either is a good choice.

In general low-end CPU launches are nothing to get excited about. Sure they have the same feature sets as their cousins above them in the pricing charts but they don’t contain the same performance. In comes AMD’s Athlon X2 7750 and 7550 CPUs which are dual core K10 (Phenom) based chips instead of the usual K8 based chips found in the product line. bit-tech has some thoughts on this new CPU choice:

AMD’s converted many of its Athlon X2s to 65nm nearly two years ago after it launched the 5000+ ‘Brisbane’ processor on its “Energy Efficient” 65nm process. These have been extended throughout the year, quietly replacing the old 90nm dual cores and even including new releases like the fantastic 45W 4850e as well.

AMD’s new ‘Kuma’ core is also based on the same 65nm SOI (Silicon on Insulator) process, but it’s now K10 cored just like the Phenoms. Keep reading, because I promise this is actually a good thing, at least in theory.

What the current Phenoms lack is clock speed and thermal overhead – four cores suck up all the available TDP and prevent high retail clocks and ludicrous overclocking that Intel’s Core 2 Quads could achieve. While it does perform well (for its price) in a specifically multi-threading environment, not everyone cares for quad core and games for the most part still benefit from MHz, MHz and more MHz.

It’s a good performer for a low end chip although the enthusiast crowd might just be disappointed.