It’s hard to believe that with the popularity and adoption rate of netbooks today that the devices only hit the market at the end of 2007. At the beginning of the netbook revolution the machines lacked a purpose built CPU for their portable nature. However, it didn’t take long for Intel to offer a CPU just for the class with its Atom line.

Intel is celebrating the 1-year anniversary of the Atom processor by announcing a pair of new Atom parts. The high-end part is the Z550 and the bad boy runs at 2GHz and features Intel’s hyper threading technology. All of that performance is crammed into a power envelope of 3 watts so it shouldn’t be a battery killer.

Intel also announced the miserly Z515 running at 1.2GHz and using Intel Burst Technology. The processor is aimed at thin and small machines that need power efficiency over raw power. Intel also talked a bit about the Lincroft platform coming in 2010 that integrates 45nm Atom processor cores with a graphics processor and memory controller.

Intel