Intel Atom processor die

Intel’s next generation Atom platform, codenamed Pine Trail, will be moved up and is expected to announce on December 21st, in time for CES in January. If you’ve been in the market for a netbook, you might do better to wait for Pine Trail or even the rumored ThinkPad netbook.

Pine Trail offers a number of improvements over the current Atom platform, but the benefits a more tangible for Intel and its partners than consumers. The biggest change is moving the memory controller and graphics core onto the processor itself. While this doesn’t yield much in the way of performance improvement, it should reduce power consumption noticeably and most importantly reduce system cost. Intel and partners should see an increase in profit margin on the typically razor-thin profits that netbooks currently see.

On the mobile side of things, the single-core 1.66GHz Atom N450 is expected to announce with 512KB L2 cache, Hyperthreading, and 64-bit support. Desktops, aka nettops, will get the dual-core D510 which is identical to the N450 save for 1MB L2 cache. A single core, 512KB L2 version of the D510 will be called the D410. Down the road we should see a 1.83GHz mobile chip dubbed the N470.

Source: [The Register]