It looks like Intel’s new Pine Trail processors will be getting an update in the third quarter of 2010. But don’t expect a major change in speed, power consumption, or overall performance. The only real difference is that the new chips will support DDR3 RAM while the current Intel Atom N450 and N470 chips can only handle DDR2 RAM.
Fudzilla reports that the new processors will bear the N455 and N475 names. Since they’re due out in the second half of the year, it’s reasonable to assume we may see a number of new netbook models released in the third quarter. But I was kind of expecting that anyway.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about support for DDR3 chips. Fudzilla had a similar report in December. But at the time there was no mention of a launch date.
There is some good news in that though. For starters, DDR3 officially only goes as low as 800MHz. The N450 is using 667MHz DDR2, so unless Intel does something very un-intel like and start fooling around with clocks, N4_5s will get faster memory. 🙂 A N475 might be interesting.
Oh, that and DDR3 draws a little bit less power then DDR2.