Most Intel Atom chips on the market today support up to 2GB of memory — but most netbooks ship with 1GB of RAM, because that’s the only way to qualify for a low cost Windows 7 Starter license at the moment. But Fudzilla is reporting that there could be a shakeup in the Atom-based notebook market later this year.
According to Fudzilla, which has a habit of not explaining where its information is coming from, the upcoming 1.86 GHz Intel Atom N2800 chip will be able to support up to 4GB of DDR3 memory.
Fudzilla also claims that we’ll see machines with Intel Atom N2600 and N2800 Cedar Trail chips sporting 32GB solid state disks or hard drives of up to 250GB. Recommended operating systems will include Windows 7 Starter Edition, Windows 7 Home Basic, Meego Linux, and Chrome OS — although I suspect we’ll see Windows 7 Home Premium loaded onto any laptops with 2GB of RAM or more.
The report suggests that we could start to see these new models in the fourth quarter of 2011 for between $329 and $399.