Intel has started shipping its third-generation Atom chips for low-power mobile computers such as netbooks. The company says products with Cedar Trail chips will debut in early 2012, with some of the first devices coming from Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba. Noticeably absent from that list? Dell. The company recently announced that it’s pulling the plug on its…

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VIA Technologies has introduced its first quad core processor. The 1.2 GHz VIA QuadCore chip has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 27.5 watts. While that makes it a bit of an energy hog when compared with low power ARM or Intel Atom processors, I can’t think of another quad-core x86 chip that uses so little power. The VIA QuadCore…

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ARM-based chips power the vast majority of tablets that have hit the streets in the past year or so, but Intel is hoping it’s not too late to get into the tablet space. It will likely be at least another year before Microsoft Windows is capable of running on ARM-based chips, so right now Intel and AMD chips are the…

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Intel may be king of the hill when it comes to processors for desktops, laptops, servers, and pretty much any CPU for a computer that doesn’t fit in your pocket. But the vast majority of smartphones on the market today use chips based on designs from ARM. Intel plans to change that. We’ve already seen evidence that Intel realizes power…

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A few weeks ago AMD announced that it’s new low power Ontario chips for netbooks should begin shipping to PC makers by the end of 2010. There’s always a little gap between the date when a chip maker starts shipping a processor and the time when you can walk into a store and buy a notebook with that chip inside….

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Chip maker Freescale has been making a name for itself with low power ARM-based chips recently. But now the company is branching out into the x86 space with the introduction of an audio and power management chipset designed to work with Intel’s Moorestown platform. Basically, you take an Intel Atom Z6xx chip, add Freescale’s PMIC (Power Management Integrated Circuit), and…

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[/caption] Qualcomm is best known for making ARM-based chips that end up in smartphones. But the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor also powers smartbooks like the Compaq Airlife 100 and the possibly ill-fated Lenovo Skylight. It also powers the Dell Streak tablet. Today Qualcomm introduced two new chips that could make the Snapdragon platform a lot more attractive to netbook, smartbook, and…

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We’ve been hearing for a while that Intel is working on a dual core Atom processor for netbooks. Now Fudzilla has a name for the chip: The Atom N550. The Atom N550 will reportedly have a clock speed of 1.5GHz, 1MB of L2 cache, and two cores with support for hyperthreading. Fudzilla says the TDP will be 8.5 watts, which…

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Chip maker VIA has introduced a new line of Nano processors. The VIA Nano E-Series chips are 64-bit x86 processors with support for hardware virtualization. The E-Series chips are available with speeds ranging from 800MHz to to 1.8GHz. Theyr’e compatible with VIA’s media processors such as the VX800 and VX855 as well as upcoming VX900 and VN1000 digital media chips…

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Intel offers a series of single and dual core Atom processors — but so far the dual core chips have all been designed for nettops and other low power desktop computers. Sure, a few companies (we’re looking at you, Asus) have crammed the Atom 330 desktop processor into notebooks. But Intel hasn’t officially launched a dual core chip specifically designed…

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As expected, Intel has officially introduced a slightly faster version of its Intel Atom Pine Trail chipset. While the Atom N450 clocks in at 1.66GHz, the new Atom N470 processor has a clock speed of .83GHz. It has 512k of L2 cache and supports DDR2 667 memory. Like the Atom N450, the new platform combines graphics and memory functions onto…

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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…

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