Intel Introduces Two New Desktop Atom Processors

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The folks at Intel have taken the covers off a pair of new Atom processors for desktops and nettops. As the guys at Hot Hardware wrote, the N-series Atoms have been sort of the stars of the show, with them being more prominently featured in netbooks and tablets, but the D-series of destkop Atoms is posed to make a comeback with two new processors.

The two new chips are the D425 and D525. They’re very similar, save for that the D425 is a single-core processor and the D525 is a dual-core processor. Both share a 1.8GHz clockspeed, with 512K of L2 cache and are built on a 45nm wafer. They also have support for DDR3 memory – something that early netbooks and nettops have been missing.

As we covered, Intel saw a big drop in Atom sales in Q1 2010 and the whole netbook market saw a big slow down. As fond of my Dell Mini 10 netbook as I am – it’s almost hard not to see netbooks as a cheap stop-gap that kept the computer industry afloat during the recession. Will netbooks be more popular than notebooks in 10 years?

But, if any chip was going to save the Atoms from further decline, it would be these new chips. HotHardware estimates that these new D425 and D525 Atoms will see a 10-14% performance upgrade over the previous Atom chips. We also know that Intel has reworked the SoC systems on these chips to allow support for Broadcom HD decoder chips, so the Atoms will have an easier time playing HD Flash video.

Will the Atom chips make a comeback? Are you considering buying a netbook or nettop?