Intel officially announced today, its new dual-core Atom processor, the N550, set to be available in over a dozen new netbooks from companies including Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI, Toshiba by the end of the year.

While Intel had released dual-core Intel Atom processors earlier in 2010, they were a part of the “D” lineup and featured only in desktop and ITX systems.

The N550 is a dual core, four threaded processor specifically for netbooks that brings the same low power consumption we’ve come to expect from the single core Atom’s such as the N450, as well as DDR3 support; however, Intel has scaled back the core speed to 1.50 GHz, but bumped the cache to 1MB.

On paper the N550 appears to be the processor to look out for when shopping for a netbook that focuses on battery life as well as solid multi-core performance.

Some models expected to feature the Atom N550 are the Acer Aspire One D255 and Asus EEE 1015n.

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