Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Codenamed Pine Trail, Intel's 45nm Atom N450 will be a single-core CPU with built-in northbridge functions, and will be paired with the new NM10 (Tiger Point) chipset."

The new Atom looks to update much of the infrastructure around the Atom CPU itself and supposedly also gives the whole setup the ability to display 1080p video. This mostly seems like an evolutionary upgrade for Intel though it will probably be just enough to keep lots of manufacturers from jumping ship for an alternative solution like the NVidia ION platform. It is good to see progress being made, however small, but outside of improved graphics performance, I am not sure if the netbook/nettop CPU industry really has that much excitement left in it. Manufacturers seem to have found the netbook sweet spot for size, and can only really differentiate themselves with design now. The race to the top does not seem to concern most people. Now it is a race to the longest battery life!

"Intel renewed its netbook push Tuesday with the formal announcement of its next-generation Atom platform, codenamed Pine Trail. The details of Pine Trail, including the late 2009 launch date, had already been widely leaked, and today's disclosure provided little new information. But for those who haven't followed the Pineview leaks, I'll break down the details of what was announced."

Ars Technica provides a good glimpse on what we can expect from Intel in the netbook market over the coming months and to be honest, I have to say that I am disappointed. The changes Intel is making smells more of protecting their netbook marketshare instead of pushing for innovation. What really surprised me is how Intel is pricing their solution, making more powerful solutions such as the NVidia ION far more expensive. I was hoping that Intel would come up with something dazzling which would help shake up the netbook market, but now I think that the only netbooks I'll be considering or recommending for the next year will be those based on ION. While 3D performance is not required for most of what netbooks do now, I'm finding it becoming increasingly important. From casual games to Google Earth, the 3D boost is definately worth the extra power consumption.