The PC Report

If you’re wanting to be an early adopter to WiMAX then you may be wanting to take a look at the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 with WiMAX that is coming via Clearwire on April 1 this year. The Mini 10 sports an Intel Atom N450 “Pineview” processor at 1.6 GHz along with a 250 GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM. It also includes a Broadcom Crystal HD chip that is capable of playing back 1080p flash through Flash Player 10.3 beta and is also capable of playing 1080p .wmv files.

Other features of the netbook include a 10″ 1366 x 768 display, three USB ports, Ethernet, VGA, headphone + microphone jack and an SD card slot – no HDMI though. The Mini 10 is also slightly heavier and thicker than its competition coming in at 1.3 kg heavy and 3.3 cm thick at its thickest point. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 with WiMAX will be available for US$249.99 after an instant rebate, and the WiMAX plan will of course set you back further.

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.

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.

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.

Remember how Intel said that its new Pine Trail Atom processors were on schedule for this year back in July? Looks like they were right; we are now seeing a Chinese nettop with the new Intel Atom D510 processor on the inside, packing two-cores at 1.66GHz. The KND K1850 is an all-in-one nettop with a nice 18.6″ display and although it packs the new Pine Trail CPU, I doubt it will be leaving China any time soon

Other specs include 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, built in DVD drive, WiFi and a 3-in-1 card reader. Although this nettop probably isn’t going to leave China, it is expected that soon major manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo will release their line of Pine Trail nettops and netbooks, breaking the long reign that the Atom N270 and N280 has had on the market.