Repeating old next-gen Atom rumors

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

September 9, 2009 1:21 PM ET in News, , , , , , , , , , ,

intelSome sites have begun rehashing old rumors regarding Pine Trail, the next Intel Atom platform. Word of an early 2010 release began in June, and that rumor is playing out again with the addition of one Atom N470 to the predicted chip lineup.

The newly-whispered N470 is alleged to be a HyperThreaded single core design running at 1.83GHz. If true, it will be little more than a premium version of the N450 which began making the rounds in June.

What we know for certain is that the Netbook market is at a virtual stand-still until the advent of Windows 7 on October 22. While the super secret roadmaps have long pegged Pine Trail for the new year, Windows 7 seems like an awfully auspicious occasion for reeling in the timetable.

Given that both time frames are equally probable, we’re content to watch this one bear out.

14 Comments:

  1. Cliff_Forster
    9 Sep '09, 6:08 pm

    Wow, so in early 2010 we will be able to run two threads in slow motion! Yippee!!

  2. Thrax
    9 Sep '09, 6:24 pm

    Despite your fanboyish perspective on the Intel Atom, a great many people on Icrontic are more than satisfied with their product and its performance.

  3. Cliff_Forster
    9 Sep '09, 6:27 pm
    Quoting Thrax

    Despite your fanboyish perspective on the Intel Atom, a great many people on Icrontic are more than satisfied with their product and its performance.

    Calm down, I'm just doing a little light trollin.

  4. lunchb0x
    9 Sep '09, 6:29 pm
    Quoting Cliff_Forster

    Calm down, I'm just doing a little light trollin.

    I would have went with "But will it run Crysis?!?!" personally

  5. mirage
    9 Sep '09, 7:50 pm

    How does current Atom compare with old Dothan clock for clock? Anyone?

  6. Komete
    10 Sep '09, 2:05 am
    Quoting Thrax

    Despite your fanboyish perspective on the Intel Atom, a great many people on Icrontic are more than satisfied with their product and its performance.

    I'm not. I bought my 8 year old an Atom powered netbook to keep her off of my pc. Even she thinks it's too slow. I'm convinced they are a step in the wrong direction.

  7. Thrax
    10 Sep '09, 4:43 am

    Did you bring the DRAM up to 2GB, or did you buy one of the Netbooks with crippled memory expansion capabilities?

  8. lordbean
    10 Sep '09, 5:15 am

    I own an Asus eee 1000HE upgraded to 2GB, and I'm quite pleased with it. At the lowest settings, it can even run world of warcraft with enough framerate to play it.

    I'm quite happy with the Atom chip. I think it does what it's designed to do very nicely.

  9. Komete
    10 Sep '09, 6:36 am

    It is upgradeable but I haven't upgraded the memory. In fact, I have to send it back in for an exchange. It just upped and died while playing a divix movie. I'm pretty sure once I get it back I'm going to sell it on ebay and buy a gateway LT netbook/ultra thin notebook.

    To me the only thing it was good for was sending emails and watching a divix movie on a trip. Just browsing the internet was frustrating. Maybe I would have felt differently if I got one with a bigger screen. I'm hoping the LT will hit the spot. Come on win7

  10. Cliff_Forster
    10 Sep '09, 2:56 pm

    http://laptoping.com/intel-atom-benchmark.html

    *breaks out in song*

    Who's slower than an old Celeron just a little faster than that eight year old Pentium III, its atom. Whose battery lasts most the day but you still get nothing done, its atom. Who cannibalized the portable computing market just because he could, its atom, its atom, its atom!!

    All kidding aside, the atom is an interesting niche product, but it is slow as dirt, and that's not me being fan boy, its just true. As long as the people buying understand that its simply a chip to be a glorified word processor and low res web browser, that's fine, that's all some folks want or need on the road, and it will functionally do that, but not much else.

    My snarky remark at the beginning was just pointing out that Intel should not be marketing this as having any significant modern performance features. Perhaps change "hyper"threading to dual threading or something, because there is going to be absolutely nothing "hyper" about it.

  11. Annes
    10 Sep '09, 3:10 pm

    *shrug*

    I use my netbook constantly at work. It's an MSI Wind U100 upgraded to 2GB of RAM. It seriously does EVERYTHING I need a computer to do (sans gaming) and I don't think it's slow at all. I'm not sure what you guys are doing wrong, but it's something.

  12. Thrax
    10 Sep '09, 3:19 pm

    ^ This.

  13. lordbean
    10 Sep '09, 3:33 pm

    Agreed with annes. I don't think a Pentium III could run world of warcraft as well as an Atom can.

    I've heard there's even a few netbooks with discrete video. If you want gaming on that kind of screen size, they actually offer a model to do it.

  14. Cliff_Forster
    10 Sep '09, 3:51 pm

    So the benchmarks lie in this case, but they are what we obsess over when we talk about desktop performance?

    If you want to look at the web, type in open office, perhaps make a ten page power point, atom is fine.

    If you want to convert media files, want to accelerate video, want to create a large .pdf, want to run an anti virus scan while attempting to do anything else, its slow as dirt when you compare it to any other modern computing product, its a fact that a million bars and charts all over the web tell us, but because its cheap and it does the couple little things you want it to do, nobody can state the fact that its the slowest processor in current production without being labeled a biased? Its a fact, the atom is the slowest processor currently available from any chip vendor. Hell the Via Nano is clocked half at half the frequency and its beats it in terms of raw processing speed, but its TDP is about 5X higher and it drains battery faster, its not a knock on the atom design, but lets call it what is is, cool, power sipping all while being the slowest thing currently available to users.

    Now, that's not necessarily a horrible thing, its a niche product, some compromises have been made to extend the battery life and get it cool enough to run in its cutesy itty bitty little package. I'm just saying if anyone thinks adding hyperthreading to the atom is going to make it some kind of performance chip, its not.

    Its a cheap chip for browsing the web and typing email. I think its eventual payoff for Intel is going to be in other mobile applications, its flexible, I'm not knocking atom, but people should just recognize it for what it is. Saying its adding hyperthreading when its barely faster than an old Pentium III, well, that really should not knock anyone's socks off.

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