Intel has announced the launch of a new processor for netbooks in Q4 of this year. Codenamed ‘Pineview’, this super netbook chip is slated to be the successor to the highly popular Atom processor. Mr. Jeff DeMuth of Intel Marketing made this announcement at the recent San Francisco Intel Developer Forum.
The Pineview chips are part of the Pine Trail platform that has a no. of improvements in terms of speed, size and power consumption that will result in faster, thinner designs and higher battery life. Netbooks with Pineview chips are expected to hit the market in Q1 of 2010.
Some of the advantages of Pineview chips over existing Atom chips include
- Faster netbooks with CPU that clocks higher clock frequencies i.e. more than 1.6 GHz that was available in 2009
- Smaller motherboard with size reduced from 2174mm of Atom to 773mm
- Graphics processor core frequency up from 133MHz to 200MHz
- Support for faster memory chips from DDR2 533 to DDR2 667
- Simpler PCB design with no. of layers reduced from 6 to 4
- Thermal Design Power (TDP) reduced from 8W to 7W
- The average power consumption will be only 2W and the CPU will be capable of fanless design
- Reduced cost: With 45nm process and built in Northbridge functions that include a memory controller and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP), the new netbook platform is expected to cost less
