Posted 10/16/09 at 10:13:57 AM by Paul Lilly

To kick off the new year, Intel plans to start shipping its Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66GHz, which is slightly faster than the 1.60GHz Atom N270. At $64, it's also slightly more expensive by a couple of Hamiltons.

But if you're holding out for a faster Atom chip, you may consider waiting until March when Intel starts selling its Atom N470 chip for $75. The upcoming part will kick things up a notch with a 1.86GHz clockspeed, or 200MHz faster than the N270. That's a pretty significant boost in the Atom world, even if the amount of cache (512KB) remains unchanged.

Both new chips will fit in the same FCBGA8 socket that current netbooks use. That means you can also expect some new desktop Atom chips in the pipeline, though details are scarce at the moment.

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Posted 06/11/09 at 05:30:09 PM by Andy Salisbury

Intel is poised to phase out their Atom N270 CPU soon, thanks to the launch of its successor – the Atom N450.

The Atom N450 (codenamed Pine Trail) will be a single core CPU with built-in northbridge functions, and will work in concert with the brand new NM10 (Tiger Point) chipset. Intel will issue the last order notice for the N270 in Q1 of 2010, and the CPU will fully phase out by Q2 of 2010.

It’s expected that the N450 will launch in October of this year at the very earliest.

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