Intel's Atom successor is going by the codename of Pineview, and having been shown off at last week's COMPUTEX, rumours are quickly surfacing in regards to the chip's specification and availability.
Earlier this week, reports suggested that Intel's first Pineview part, the netbook-orientated Atom N450, would arrive in the market as soon as October. Today, that chip's specification appears to have been detailed by Chinese website hkepc.com.
According to the site, Intel's first N400-series Atom, the N450, will feature a CPU clocked at 1.66GHz with a 677MHz FSB and 512KB of L2 cache, making the CPU not too dissimilar to the current Intel Atom N280.
What's different, of course, is that the Pineview-based Atom N450 features a CPU, an IGP and a memory controller on a single die. According to industry sources, the N450's IGP will be Intel's GMA500 - clocked at 200MHz. That's just 67MHz quicker than the GMA950 often used in tandem with the Intel Atom N270, but what's impressive is the quoted power usage.
Should the numbers be believed, the Pineview platform - consisting of an Atom processor and Intel's NM10 Tiger Point I/O - will feature a TDP of around 7 watts. That's almost half the TDP rating of the tried-and-trusted Atom N270, 945GSE and ICH7M combo.
The IGP, it seems, won't offer a vast improvement in terms of performance and won't give NVIDIA's ION a run for its money. The N450's power credentials, however, are a marked improvement - we should be looking at netbooks with far greater battery life, and passive nettops, too.
