Intel has officially started to ship its dual-core Atom 330 processors, although it appears that the new 1.6GHz, 8W dual core budget processor is not going to find its way into netbooks anytime soon, as this appears to be a desktop only CPU.

The Intel press release states "The newest member of the Atom family is designed specifically for nettops, which are affordable desktops purpose-built primarily for Web surfing, email, and basic Internet usage." This rules out the usage in notebooks, at least until Intel comes up with a specific model dedicated for portable devices.

The CPU has 1MB of L2 cache, although due to the construction of the CPU, it would be more correct to say two times 512kB, as each of the two Hyperthreaded CPUs has its own dedicated cache memory. We've yet to see any benchmarks of this ultra budget dual-core CPU, but it will be interesting to see how well it fares.

The Atom 330 is expected to retail for around US$43 to Intel partners, which is a fair bit more than the Atom 230's $29. We're not sure it'll be an instant hit, especially with all the restrictions on the Atom platform that Intel has put in place to prevent it from competing with its other platforms. We're still waiting to see more partners' boards, but if the Intel and ECS boards that we've seen so far are anything to go by, we have a feeling that people will shun this dual-core CPU based on the higher cost.