Laptop choiche

The Intel Atom Pine Trail chips are due to be released on January 11. These chips have processor, graphics and memory functions integrated into a single chip. Pine Trail processors are meant to reduce power consumption. They are unlikely to give a performance boost. But in 2011 or so, Intel plans to launch yet another line of processors code-named Cedar Trail. According to sources, the Cedar Trail processors will considerably improve the overall performance of the laptop.

The Cedar Trail chips will be based on the 32nm process, the Pine Trail processors, on the other hand, are based on the 45nm process. These processors are expected to deliver twice the graphics performance of Pine Trail processors. That should make them capable of handling 1080 p HD video content. But playing GPU-intensive 3D games will still be out of question.

Intel doesn’t normally talk about unreleased products, but bloggers do. Some rumors doing the rounds suggest that the successor to the Intel Atom Pine Trail platform would be known by the name Cedar Trail. There is no confirmation from Intel yet, but now it seems that more details have emerged.

Unofficial sources claim that the Cedar Trail platform could be based on a 32nm process. The Cedar Trail chips are expected to support DDR3 1066 RAM, HD Video and DirectX 10.1 standard. The platform is expected to be released in 2011 but the processors may not be available until at least 2013.

If the Cedar chips do support HD video playback, they would considerably improve the performance of netbooks. The current generation of Atom processors have very limited HD video capabilities and the upcoming Pine Trail processors won’t improve the situation much either as they are meant to consume less power than the existing Atom processors with n

Intel has unveiled two Atom processors based on its Pine Trail platform - the N450 and the N470.

The N450 is relatively slower with a clock speed of 1.66GHz. The recently unveiled N470 is much faster at 1.83GHz clock speed. This processor is expected to be used in select netbooks in the first quarter of next year.

Like N450, the N470 is a single core processor supporting hyper-threading. This Pine Trail chipset comes with a TDP of 6.5 W which is much better than the TDP of N270 Atom processors common in netbooks. Another plus point of the Pine Trail Atom processors is that they include an integrated IGP on the same silicon. More details are expected to be revealed at Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) scheduled to be held from September 22 to 24.