Up and at them! Guess what’s coming this Rocktober? New Atom CPU. The N450 will replace the N270, according to DigiTimes. The N270 will still be available to manufacturers until the first half of next year but the N450 will start appearing later this year for a nice, technological cross-fade, if you will.
The N450 is codenamed “Pine Trail” — see previous coverage here — and represents a shift from a 3-chip to a 2-chip platform architecture, with the graphics chipset and memory controller moving in with the processor on the “north” complex, with the I/O being in the “south” complex.
The system board will move from six to four layers, too. All of this will result in smaller designs that are more efficient from a power and cooling standpoint.
So basically by the holidays we’ll see slimmer, smaller, cooler netbook-type devices with longer battery life. Hooray.
What worries me somewhat is that we have no idea of the performance of the graphic core that will be integrated in this new Atom. The current Intel 945 graphic core is one of the weak point of the current netbooks, so I hope that this time we’ll get accelerated HD decoding.