Intel is lacking a strong competitor on the netbook/nettop market where its Atom processor has become the sole ruler. With a low power consumption and stripped price tag it’s a real nice choice for the small budget PCs that has become so immensely popular. If there is anywhere where the Atom platform is insufficient it is the performance. The CPU is in no way meant to be any kind of heavy number cruncher and has been designed for simpler tasks like browsing the web, light office work and such.
But many want to use their netbooks and nettops for more than that. Intel is planning to launch a faster Atom processor in the third quarter 2009, but don’t get your hopes up too much. Atom N280 will operate at 1.66GHz, in other words just 66MHz more than the current Atom N270. The optimized bus will most likely result in a bigger boost then, it has been pushed up to 667MHz, instead of 533MHz with today’s Atom processors.
The most interesting bit is not the processor itself but what it will ship alongside of, a new chipset called GN40. The new chipset will come with an optimized HD video compatible graphics circuit. This certainly sounds like a direct competitor for NVIDIA’s more powerful Ion platform, but we still don’t know if GN40 supports 1080p material, something Ion definitely does.
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