• Tweet
• Email

Word on the street is that Intel will officially introduce the Atom N470 Pine Trail chip on Monday. And when I say Street, I mean that’s what CNET and PC World are reporting, stealing a little bit of Intel’s thunder. Of course, there wasn’t much thunder left in the bag after Lenovo, Gigabyte, and other PC makers started showing off products with the N470 chip, only to later remove those product pages.

The Intel Atom N470 will clock in at 1.83GHz, making it a bit faster than the 1.66GHz Atom N450 chip found in a wide range of recently launched netbooks. Like the N450, the Atom N470 platform will combine the CPU and graphics controller on a single chip. It’s a single core processor, but it supports hyperthreading.

While the Atom N470 will offer a slight performance boost over the Atom N450 chip, I imagine it will also draw a little more power, which could take a toll on battery life. But the Pine Trail netbooks I’ve played with so far tend to get stellar battery life of anywhere from 6 to 11 hours of run time. So a little bit of extra power drain probably won’t be the end of the world.

PC World suggests that Atom N470-based netbooks could begin shipping as early as next week.