UK Netbook Review

From Digitimes we learn today that NVidia has received orders for ION 2 based chips from Acer designed to support Pine Trail processors. If the rumour holds true (and you never quite know for sure with Digitimes, it means we’ll see a Pine Trail processor’ed netbook with Nvidia’s Ion 2 graphics chip from Acer in 2010. The ION 2 graphics platform is said to offer more than 2x the power of the current ION platform and will include support for switchable graphics and the VIA processors. We’ll probably see more about Nvidia’s ION 2 at CES 2010.

Sick and tired of seeing N270 and N280 over and over again in the specs for the latest netbook? Well, you’re not alone. At long last, we’re hearing that Intel will supposedly officially announce the Pine Trail platform in late December this year, which lines up nicely with the new netbooks scheduled to debut at CES in January. Three new processors are expected. For netbooks, there will be the 1.66GHz Atom N450. For nettops, a dual-core 1.66GHz AtomD510 and a single core Atom D410 , also at 1.66ghz. The nettop procs will get 1mb of L2 cache, while het N450 netbook processor has to make do with 512KB of L2 cache.

Have you ever wondered why netbooks have such a homogeneous makeup – 1.6ghz processor, 160gb, 1gb ram.  Sound familiar?  Well, there’s a reason for that.  In order for Intel to sell you their Atom processors, you have to agree to their terms for the hardware.  Today, Fudzilla reports that Intel has revised the specification slightly. [...]

Fudzilla is reporting that we’ll see Intel’s new Atom N450 Pineview processor on January 3rd. Clocking in at 1.66ghz, the N450′s main benefits are not speed, but rather smaller size and less power consumption. From the rumour mill, we Fudzilla is also reporting that the chip will use a Intel GM3150 graphics core, rather than the GMA500 that was previously reported.

According to Fudzilla and Blogeee, Intel will launch a new Intel Atom N470 chip during the first quarter of 2010. The new Atom processor gets a speed bump to 1.83ghz – an improvement over the current N280 which runs at 1.66ghz. Like the N280 processor, the new N470 procesor will run a 667MHz FSB. Intel will also release a slower 1.66ghz N450 processor at the same time.