As expected, Intel announced its new dual core Atom 330 during IDF this week and the company upgraded the D945GCLF motherboard by adding a two to the end of the model name, to indicate that it has a dual core processor.

The D945GCLF2 motherboard is more or less identical to the D945GCLF, although the CPU has been fitted with a larger heatsink due to the extra heat produced by the second core of the Atom 330 CPU.

The Atom 330 retains Hyper Threading support, so it can process up to four threads at once. The downside of the new D945GCLF2 motherboard is the heat that the combination of the dual core CPU and the 945GC chipset produce. However, the extra performance might still make this a worthwhile option for some users.

It will be interesting to see how the dual core Atom 330 compares to VIA's Nano CPU, as the extra core should allow Intel to outperform the VIA processor in at least some benchmarks.

You can find the press release here (PDF)

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