Intel's Atom processor line has become ubiquitous with netbooks and most nettops, but these aren't the only areas the Santa Clara chip maker sees Atom processors making a splash. Recent reports suggest Intel will make a serious push into the tablet market, and more recently, the company unveiled two new Atom parts for home and small business storage applications.

These include the single-core D425 and dual-core D525, both of which come clocked at 1.8GHz and support DDR3 SO-DIMMs. The two chips are paired with Intel's 82801 IR I/O controller and support Microsoft Windows Home Server and Linux operating systems.

This is relatively new territory for Intel's Atom line, but the platform is gaining steam. Ever since Intel shoved its Atom line into the home and business storage markets back in March 2010, several companies have jumped on board, including Acer, Cisco, LaCie, LG, Netgear, QNAP, Thecus, and more.

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It would appear that new netbooks are on the horizon. According to reports, HP will launch at least two more models built around Intel's Atom N455 (1.66GHz) and N475 (1.83GHz) processors.

These will be aimed at the entry-level market, a move some analysts says is HP's way of protecting its budget business as Intel shuttles its Atom chips into low-cost notebooks.

Analysts also predict that HP's re-entry into netbook territory, along with Intel's upcoming dual-core Atom chips slated for an October release, will spark heavy competition among the industry's four biggest players, including Acer, Asus, Samsung, and HP.

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Asus has managed to squeeze about as much performance as currently possible into its new netbook, the Eee PC 1215N. It all starts with a dual-core Intel Atom D525 processor clocked at 1.8GHz, which is supplemented by Nvidia's Ion graphics chipset. Nvidia's Optimus technology is also part of the package, allowing the 1215N to switch between the discrete Ion chipset and integrated graphics to extend battery life.

Other features include choice of 250GB or 320GB hard drive, 500GB of cloud-based storage (Asus WebStorage), Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and HDMI-out.

With the HDMI-out port and Nvidia's Ion graphics, Asus claims you'll have no trouble playing back Full HD 1080p content on your a large screen TV. Embedded hardware decoders include H.264, VC1, and MPEG2.

No word yet on price or availability.

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You've probably never heard of SeaMicro before, but if the company was looking to make waves in the media, job well done. That's the sort of thing that happens when you manage to cram 512 Intel Atom processors into a 10U rack mount space.

We're talking about the company's new SM10000 server, which comes equipped with said processors slapped onto miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, according to SeaMicro. As company CEO Andrew Feldman describes it, the multitude of Atom chips can be more power-efficient than x86 chips for certain cloud and Web transaction tasks.

"Today's servers are inefficient on small workloads," Feldmen explains. "Atom turns out to be good at ordinary problems and not great at hard problems. The Internet is all about ordinary problems."

Yet there's nothing ordinary about what SeaMicro has done. Each of the 512 Z530 processors run at 1.6GHz and the whole thing needs just one-quarter of the power and space that a traditional "best-in-class" server would need for the same kinds of workloads, Feldman added.

Due for release by the end of the July, the SM10000 will command $139,000.

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