Intel: Pine Trail Atom chip still on time
updated 01:45 pm EDT, Thu July 30, 2009
Pine Trail on schedule
Intel mobile group general manager on Wednesday put an end to earlier rumors that had the next generation Atom chip for netbooks, codenamed Pine Trail, has been delayed. Mobile platforms general manager Mooly Eden said Pine Trail is on schedule at an Intel Technology Summit on Wednesday in San Francisco. The chips should now be shipped in the second half of the year, with production versions on display at the Intel Developer Forum in September.
The Pine Trail platform will, for the first time for Intel, sport an integrated graphics processor on the same piece of silicon as the main processor; the memory controller would also share space with the GPU and CPU. Making these changes will improve performance by reducing the time spent transferring information between components. It should also enable much smaller devices by reducing the size of the companion system chipset.
Previous reports had the Pine Trail-based Intel Atom N450 chip delayed until 2010, possibly affecting the launch dates for handhelds and netbooks that would use the hardware.
