Intel’s next generation Atom processor will be out in October at the earliest, according to DigTimes. The site attributes this time frame to “industry sources,” but DigiTimes has a pretty good track record of finding honest to goodness industry sources that know what they’re talking about, so there’s a decent chance this is real.

According to those sources, Intel will phase out the Atom N270 (and likely the N280) processor(s) by mid-2010. They’ll be replaced with a single core Atom N450 CPU built with a 45nm process. It’ll use the new Tiger Point NM10 chipset. Last I’d heard, the next generation Atom processors will run at clock speeds higher,  than 1.6GHz (possibly as high as 2GHz) while using less energy than the Atom N270.