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The Atom 330 CPU

I was unfortunately unable to attend IDF, however I followed all the news carefully... and on August 20th I was very interested when I read "Intel lets slip first dual-core Atom" at the Register. As Intel had not released a lot of information, there were only a few interesting facts available, but they were more than enough to whet my appetite:

• 45nm process
• 533MHz FSB
• Atom 330 was the model number
• clock speed not announced
• probably an MCM module (multiple chips per module, like the original dual core Intel parts and current quad cores)
• Socket 437 FCBGA8 soldered onto the new D945GCLF2

That is not a lot of information, but it turns out to be enough when it is combined with the information available from Intel on the current single core Atom 230 and 270 on Intel's web site, along with their microarchitecture overview, and the information provided by CPU-Z.

The Atom N270 I reviewed in my Eee PC 901 review gave me the following information with CPU-Z:

• Intel Atom N270@1.6GHz
• Diamondville
• 45nm
• Core VID 1.013V
• Family 6, Model C, Stepping 2
• Ext Family 6, Ext Model 1C, Revision C0
• Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3
• L1 Data: 24KB, L1 Inst: 32KB, L2: 512KB

Of course I also ran CPU-Z on the dual core Atom found on the D945GCLF2, and here's what I got:

That's right!

• EXACTLY the same Family, Model, Stepping and Revision!
• EMT64 is enabled
• Core VID is now 1.153V
• there are two of each type of cache

What does this mean? The speculations were correct, the dual core Atom is just two Atom dies placed onto the same package!

Of course as the Atom core is dual-threaded this means you will actually see four processor graphs in the Performance monitor.