Intel is living large on the netbook market through its Atom budget processor. The processor is used by the majority of netbooks and nettops even though there are some rather significant drawbacks of Intel’s budget platform. Intel Atom is based on old technology and the performance is far from impressive, at the same time its 945 chipset is a bottleneck by itself. With the oncoming threat from the ARM architecture in the really low budget segment and NVIDIA breathing down its neck with the Ion chipset, Intel is preparing its next generation netbook platform, Pine Trail.
The platform consists of the processor Pineview and the chipset Tiger Point. Even if we already know quite a bit about Intel’s new budget platform the processor manufacturer has decided to officially release more detailed information.
The Pineview processor will be made with 45nm technology and unlike the current Atom (Diamondville) Intel has integrated not just the memory controller but also a graphics circuit.
Pine Trail has more or less dumped the northbridge and the processor instead communicates directly with the southbridge dubbed Tiger Point.
Intel’s new Atom platform will be both more power efficient and faster, among other the integrated memory controller will be of great assistance while the graphics circuit that is now found inside the processor will hopefully improve the graphical performance of the system.
The Pine Trail platform will appear in the fourth quarter 2009, but already at Computex next month we should see the first systems based on this platform.
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