Just as the Diamondville-based netbook CPUs have desktop equivalents - the single-core 230 and the dual-core 330 - so Pineview will also have a desktop version. Roadmaps suggest the dual-core D510 - note the introduction of the 'D' prefix - will come first, in Q4, followed by the single-core D410 in Q1 2010. Pineview is expected to come to market as the Atom N450.

Will the desktop Pineviews require as much cooling as the Diamondvilles did?

Like today's desktop Diamondville's, the Dx10 series will support 64-bit computing. Early indications - though Intel hasn't said one way or the other, officially - are that so too will the N450. The N270 and N280 don't, presumably to allow the extra circuitry required to support the technology to be disabled for power-conservation reasons, just as a number of the Z-series Atoms like HyperThreading.

Finally, we come to 'Sodaville', a rarely mentioned system-on-a-chip part that's due to ship this year as a product aimed at consumer electronics kit.

Crucially, that's what are called "non-battery" CE devices, so think set-top boxes and such like. It certainly contains an Atom processing core and it's also said to integrate a PowerVR SGX graphics unit.

Atom will replace Pentium in Sodaville, the CE 3100's successor

It's the successor to 'Canmore', the media-player oriented SoC that Intel launched in the Autumn of 2008 as the Media Processor CE 3100. It combines a 90nm 800MHz Pentium M core with a GMA 500 GPU, networking, security, and controllers for a display and a wide range of other peripherals. ®