PC Pro got a chance to put Intel’s dual-core Atom 330 chip through the wringer and found some interesting results. It seems that the 330 indeed outperforms the single-core N270 processor from Intel as well as the C7-D from VIA in all key areas except one: Microsoft Office 2003 performance.

In the Office test, surprisingly, the dual-core CPU actually performed worse than both single-core chips. PC Pro posits that this could be a result of Office 2003 not being “particularly processor-intensive” and that they compared an optimized netbook with the single-core chip against a desktop version of the dual-core chip.

In other tests, the dual-core CPU did pretty well: 2D graphics, encoding, and multitasking all saw the 330 outpacing both the N270 and the VIA. Perhaps the bigger test, though, will be to see how the added core affects battery life and how much it’ll add to the price of certain netbooks.

Dual-core Atom 330 benchmarked [PC Pro via Wired]