The PC Report

According to the latest report from Fudzilla, there is going to be a two new Intel Atom processors, both with support for DDR3 memory, coming later this year. The two CPUs will be the Atom N475, which is clocked at 1.83GHz and has a TDP of 6.5W, and the Atom N455, which like the N450 has a clock speed of 1.6GHz and a TDP of 5.5W will also have support for DDR3. New netbooks with the Atom DDR3 processors should be coming in the second half of the year.

The latest thing to appear from Intel at CES 2010 is the AppUp Center: an app store designed specifically for netbooks with an Intel Atom processor on the inside. The AppUp Center, which is available now in its beta stages, will be bundled with new Atom netbooks from Asus, Acer and Samsung and also available for the public to download for either Windows or Linux. Intel has been working with over 3,000 developers to make this happen, so we decided to load it up and give it a try.

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Looks like we have another contender for the netbook Pine Trail competition. Acer’s Aspire One AO532h is nothing special, really: it has a fairly standard 10″ display in a fairly standard looking case. It packs the latest Intel Atom “Pineview” N450 processor at 1.6GHz, GMA 1350 graphics, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive – again, nothing particularly special apart from the Pineview CPU.

It does pack a 4,400 mAh six-cell battery that is stated to last for 10 hours without a recharge, which isn’t bad although we’re always skeptical of battery life claims. It will come loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition for US$299, which is cheaper than the other two Pine Trail netbooks we’ve seen (the Asus Eee PC 1001P and 1005P/PE). You should be able to grab one in the coming weeks.

Another Pine Trail Eee PC has surfaced, this time on Amazon.de. Available now for pre-order at ~US$360 is the Asus Eee PC 1001P (what seems to be the little brother of the 1005P/PE) which packs the usual 10.1″ display in a clamshell body alongside a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N450, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive loaded up with Windows XP. Oh, and no dodgy bumpy trackpad! If you pre-order one now it will ship by January 6.

It was just a few days ago that we posted some news on the upcoming Asus Eee PC 1oo5P/PE and now Intel has officially announced the new Pine Trail Atoms we’ve been waiting on. In the line-up we’re seeing an N450 designed for netbook use as well as a single-core D410 and dual-core D510 made for nettops (that we’ve seen before) and a NM10 Express chipset. All the processors have a clockspeed of 1.66Ghz are said to use 20% less power than the current-gen Atoms.

As said in various reports, the new Pineview processors don’t give much of a performance improvement over the N270 and N280 even though they contain the memory controller and graphics chipset on the die as well as the processing cores. At least the inclusion of the graphics on the chipset makes the Eee PC 1005PE last for 10 hours on the one charge. We should be seeing more of these chips at CES 2010.

Intel’s latest Atom upgrade to Pineview seems to be all ready to go with the latest Eee PC being revealed and containing the latest Pineview processor. The Eee PC 1005P and 1005PE both have sexy 10.1″ LED backlit displays, Intel Atom N450 processors, 1GB of RAM and GMA 3150 graphics (still not the best of GPUs). The PE carries a larger (250GB) hard drive and a battery that should last up to 12.5 hours.

Of course as these netbooks have yet to be announced, we don’t have a price or release date, however we expect that to be very soon. We do know, though, that the netbooks will pack Windows 7 Starter Edition, which isn’t the greatest of the Windows 7 distros but should suit you just fine. If you’re looking for a new, cheap and small laptop then the latest Eee PC with a Pineview processor should be a good purchase.

The new Pine Trail Atom chips from Intel haven’t hit the markets yet, but a German site CarTFT have got their hands on the latest D510 and D410 Pine Trail chips (designed for nettops) and put them through some performance benchmarks comparing them to current-gen Atoms. The results aren’t that surprising; we always expected the Ion platform to do better.

The new Pine Trail Atoms are slightly faster in CPU performance than current generation Atoms, with the performance difference showing in Super PI 8M; less when it comes to the real world. However, both Windows 7 and 3DMark06 favour the 330/Ion combo over the D510 and D410 when it comes to graphics-based applications, which isn’t that surprising considering Intel graphics have never been great. Luckily the chips won’t be expensive and won’t consume much power compared to current Atoms – maybe a bonus for nettops at the sacrifice of power.

With Pineview still not out the door yet, it is surprising that we are seeing the next-in-line so soon. The next generation CPU in the Intel Atom line, “Cedarview” (going with trees again like Pineview), is expected to be made using the 32nm process and will be shipping out sometime in 2011 after the upcoming Pineview processors have done their time.

Cedarview processors are also rumoured to include a DDR3 controller that supports DDR3-1066 RAM to match the Bloomfield Core i7 processors. However, it appears to only be supporting the RAM in single-channel mode even though the motherboards will contain two RAM slots. An odd choice, but I suppose Intel must have some reasoning behind the decision. We hope we’ll get more info about the Cedar Trail platform in the future.

Are you a Hackintosh user running Mac OS X on an Intel Atom powered machine? If so, you should be worried, as the next update to Apple’s Snow Leopard OS will drop support for Atom processors completely, rendering your OS X installation useless. Not surprising really, considering the Atom 330 wasn’t supported officially since Mac OS X 10.5.7

So, you Atom Snow Leopard users have two choices when the 10.6.2 update comes around. Either you can not update and stick with 10.6.1, or update to 10.6.2 but use an earlier kernel (or a custom kernel) so that you can continue to enjoy the latest Mac OS X on your Atom machine. Hopefully Atom support will be re-introduced in a later update, but I doubt it as Apple only needs to look after CPUs they actually ship in their machines.

Update: Looks like the latest developer build has brought back Atom support.

Update 2: Support is gone again, and it looks like it won’t be coming back any time soon

Intel said earlier this year that the next-gen Atom processors, Pineview, would be released by the end of this year. However according to a new report the Atom N470 running at a nice 1.83 GHz along with the N450 running at 1.66 GHz will be released in early 2010.

Both CPUs have an integrated memory controller and graphics, cutting down on a chip and using less power for longer battery life. Hopefully the price will be good enough that they will spread to new netbooks quickly and cheaply and give a solid boost in performance.