Next generation Atom processor to be launched in October

Existing Atom processors should give way to new lighter and less power consuming successors.

The roadmap to PineTrail

There is no argument on the fact that Atom has changed the way we look at the performance of the ultra-portable computers, in a sense that there comes a new experience of higher power than before, at the same time saving energy and not burning a hole in the pocket. No wonder they are so popular now, especially with the netbook category. Almost every second netbook manufactured today has the Atom. Among them are the N270 and later the N280 which became quite popular as well.

Now Intel decided to go with an even smaller but with improved efficiency chip that will be called N450. These probably won’t be the dual-core chips as being rumored earlier, but definitely lighter and smaller. Code-named “Pine trail”, these platforms will have a single-core Atom N450 CPU with built-in northbridge functions and should be paired with the new NM10 (Tiger Point) chipset.

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. The system board will also be reduced from six layers to four layers. With these kinds of reductions, we’ll see a more efficient design both in terms of power and cooling. This should result in improved battery life too – as pointed out by engadget.

So it is interesting to see if Intel decides to continue production of Atoms, or decides to phase it out.