Netbooks have been in the market and thriving well for over two years, and yet the Atom processor, the brains behind your average netbook, has been running on a single core  until today

Netbooks have been in the market and thriving well for over two years, and yet the Atom processor, the brains behind your average netbook, has been running on a single core  until today.

On Monday, Intel announced its first dual core Atom processor, the 1.5-GHz N550, which at least has the same number of physical cores as the Core i3s, the Core i5s, and Core i7s. But that doesn't mean performance is going to be as fierce.

This is not the first time a dual core Atom has found its way into a netbook. The was the first and only netbook to sport one, but it used a desktop (or nettop) variant called the Atom D330, a 1.6-GHz chip.

The N550 is the first dual core Atom based on the PineTrail platform, which basically means that it's more battery efficient than its nettop counterpart. It runs on two physical cores, totaling four threads (two threads per core). It has twice the amount of L2 cache (2 x 512KB) and will carry the same graphic chipset as the single core Atom N455, the Intel GMA 3150. The memory controller has been updated to support DDR3 memory (667-MHz max), like the single core N455, but the maximum capacity is still 2 Gbytes.

Some netbook makers are already claiming up to a 20 percent improvement in performance over the single core Atom, while battery life differential is around 15 to 20 minutes. Note that you're still dealing with netbook speeds, but at least basic productivity will seem a little faster now. The first crop of dual-core netbooks will arrive in September.