Intel to intro next-gen netbook Atom on 10 January?
Stepping onto the 'Pine Trail'
Expect a raft of new netbooks based on Intel's next-generation 'Pine Trail' Atom chippage after 10 January - the day the products will be formally launched, it seems.
That date is slap-bang in the middle of the Consumer Electronics Show. CES, which kicks off in Las Vegas on 7 January, has long expected to host Pine Trail's introduction.
The precise date is what Asian hardware manufacturers are saying, DigiTimes reports. Acer, Asus, Lenovo and MSI, to name but four, will all introduce Pine Trail-based netbooks on 11 January.
Some of these products, such as the Asus Eee PC 1005P, are already making appearances, albeit in name only, on company websites.
Pine Trail will initialy comprise the Atom N450 processor and a supporting I/O chip. The platform's graphics will be built into the N450, as will the DDR 2 memory controller. The N450 will be clocked at 1.66GHz and contain 512KB of L2 cache. It will support HyperThreading for dual-core like operation. It'll do 64-bit too.
Whizz for Atoms Inside Intel's next netbook generation
COMMENTS
When are we going to get faster processors?
Intel seem to be stuck at 1.6GHz with this CPU. I know the whole point of a netbook is to be cheap and battery friendly, but the screens sizes keep going up and so do the prices. I'd actually like to see the performance increase for once.
Better how?
Google finds me web pages saying that this processor's main improvement is better integrated graphics provision, and power economy, but what I crave is the power for effective speech recognition - portable. Well, maybe not in this generation - unless I can send speech signals back to my desktop PC for decoding, or to some poor typist in India. Then again... can you put more CPUs in one PC?
Atom
The Atom was supposed to "take over" the mobil phone market -- and did not. Now Intel are stuffing into small notebooks aka "netbooks". Who knows where this "me too" low power processor will wind up next? Wherever that is it will never be innovative. It will however be produced in large quantities.
@Si 1
I think it's not only about energy consumption, but also heat dissipation. Netbooks need chips that run cool.
Not fast enough
What about SPEED? I just set up a Vaio X laptop for a client and it was very sleek but too slow at 2GHz. Any news on faster atom procesors or 64bit Atom processors? As far as I heard the new processor is 1.6 GHz only and a 1.8 GHz processor will be released later.
