Intel on Monday morning rebuffed claims from late last week that it was cutting off Atom Z500 supplies. A spokeswoman for the company told Register staff that the rumors, which would have all of the netbook-class processors off the market, are "100% inaccurate." Intel's long-term plans for the Z series aren't known, though it's expected that the company's Pine Trail platform will make the Z series at least partially obsolete.

Pine Trail builds both a memory controller and a graphics core into the main processor package, simultaneously shrinking the overall size of the design and improving performance by eliminating some of the bandwidth bottlenecks that affect current Atom processors. The first models should ship in the fall.