Motherboards containing Atom Pinetrail doing rounds

Both feature Atom D series processors

Intel is not expected to launch the next-generation Pinetrail CPUs till early next (N450 is coming in Jan first week), but already Motherboards containing these are doing rounds on the online retail sites – as reported by Fudzilla. Two of them are the Intel Essential Series ITX motherboards with Intel Atom D series processors.

The D510MO motherboard sports a dual core 1.67GHz Intel Atom D510 CPU with 2×512kb of cache and a 13W TDP. It is accompanied by Intel’s inhouse GMA 3150 graphics card built onto the same chip – keeping the overall TDP quite low than today’s similar combinations of CPU and graphics card.

The D410PT sports a single core Intel Atom D410 processor with a clocking of 1.66GHz. Both boards should be passively cooled, so no fans required. They also feature Ethernet and VGA ports, 3 external USB ports and 4 internal ones, and 2 SATA II connectors – Fudzilla reports. The D510MO board should feature 5.1 channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet; while the D410PT has 10/100MB LAN but not 5.1 channel audio.

The current generation chips are the N270 and the N280 which are very popular with netbook vendors, and pushing back the Pinetrail launching date is expected to increase the self-life a bit more before they become obsolete. Although a Pinetrail CPU isn’t significantly faster than today’s Atom chips, It’s primary advantage will be improved energy efficiency. By the way, the first Pinetrail N450 is expected to debut on Jan 3^rd next year.