Intel, on Monday, officially launched the first major revision of its popular Atom platform for netbooks and low cost PCs. The new platform, Pine Trail, has moved both the memory controlled and the graphics controller into the main processor.
The company said the new platform would reduce battery consumption by 20% and space requirement (for the chipset) by 60%, enabling it to migrate the chips onto smaller handheld devices as well. The chips, however, would continue to be madeon the 45-nanometer die and not the recently announced, more power efficient 32-nanometer die.
For desktops, the new processors would result in a 50% reduction in power consumption. In all, it has announced one netbook oriented processor (N450) and two for the desktops -D410 and D510, replacing the current N2xx series and the D3xx series.
Intel's mainstay 945 chipset, which includes separate chips for graphics and memory has been dropped altogether as the functions have been taken over the main processor complex.
Details about which driver will be used with the NM10 are not known and are eagerly awaited due to the poor performance of its earlier two-chip design, based on the Atom Z5xx series processor.
Intel also announced that in addition to the Microsoft Windows installed netbooks, the new design netbooks will also come out with Intel-created linux operating system - Moblin.
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