Intel details the new Pine Trail netbook/nettop platform

This new platform promises to improve performance and graphics

Integration of memory controller and graphics with the Pineview processor

Features

Intel has recently been quite busy building stuff and has publically announced the release of the Moblin v2.0 beta operating system for netbooks and the Pine Trail netbook platform which will supposedly replace the popular Atom processor. According to Intel, the netbook segment is very lucrative as it has quickly captured a high market share and predictions point out that this upward trend is going to last for a couple of years. To cash in on it, Intel has announced the next generation Pine Trail platform which is said to offer improved performance and graphics than the Intel Atom processor.

The Pine Trail platform will help to further drive down the cost of the netbook as it is said to lower the BOM (Bill of Material) cost significantly as it uses a two-chip configuration rather than the previously used three-chip configuration. According to the new configuration the memory controller and the graphics would be integrated on the same processor chip which was earlier built on a separate chipset (945GC/945GSE chipset in case of Atom processors using Intel Core Logic architecture). This move will allow motherboards to be built with just a four layer PCB since trace routing will be much simpler. Moving on to the input/output controller, the improved Tiger Point chipset will replace the existing ICH7/ICH7M chipset.  Tiger Point will support SATA, USB 2.0, PCI Express and Intel HD Audio.

The advantage of using this new architecture is that the Pine Trail can run faster thereby increasing processor performance and graphics performance. Moreover, the power requirements are further reduced to about 7W TDP meaning that the battery life would be increased. Intel also says that fanless systems could be built on the Pine Trail platform but at relative configuration tradeoffs.

It is believed that this processor would be ready and in use by Q4 2009.