It’s no surprise that Intel has been working on its next-generation low power Atom processor platform for a while. Now it looks like the company is set to unleash the first Intel Atom Pine Trail chip designed for netbooks in early January. Fudzilla is reporting that the company will launch the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 on January 3rd.
The timing makes sense, since that date falls just a few days before CES 2010, where I suspect we’ll see dozens, if not hundreds of devices based on Intel’s next-generation Atom platform.
The Atom N450 will incorporate memory and graphics functions onto a single chip which will help it to use less power than the Atom N270/N280 chipsets available in today’s netbooks.
Fudzilla is also reporting that the chip will use a graphics core called GMA 3150. Previously we’d been hearing that the chip would have GMA 500 graphics.
The GMA 3150 graphics core should offer slightly better performance than the GMA 950 graphics found in most of today’s netbooks. But it’s strength is still in power conservation, not powering bleeding edge graphical applications.
I think Intel’s decision to closely link the CPU and the GPU on the same silicon is a direct response to Nvidia and others who have more powerful graphics processors. Intel is making the manufacturers buy its GPU, even though they want to use ION or another GPU to distinguish their products. While it’s common for desktop machines to add a separate graphics card even though the CPU chipset has graphics capability. However, in a netbook, you’re wasting board space and power, not to mention dollars, when you have to buy Intel’s GPU as well as a third party’s.
I, er… hmmm, this has confused things.
Will N450/470 be compatible with Ion or will we see CPU-only alternatives? Presumably such a combination would lead to substantially higher power use unless the integrated Intel graphics core could be turned off rather than just disabled/deactivated.
I was finally (grudgingly) about to plump for one of the new, bigger Ion netbooks but the Atom still holds them back in many situations – any sort of boost to the Clock/FSB would be most welcome.
And the wait would allow for some 9/10 inch Ionbooks to appear 😀