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As Atom based netbook sales continue to thrive, with new models becoming available almost every day, Intel is faced with a new problem. Originally Intel was worried that Atom sales would cannibalize their low cost Celeron line but soon seemed to realize they would not be able to stop that and largely gave up trying. Now they are concerned their next generation Atom platform, codenamed Pinetrail, will steal sales from existing Atom “Diamondville” Netbooks.

Pinetrail is a two chip platform, consisting of the Atom N450 ‘Pineview’ chip which integrates the processor, graphics and memory controller onto a single chip and the NM10 Express Tiger Point chipset for I/O via a point-to-point Direct Media Interface (DMI) link. The two chip Pinetrail platform is supposed to be more powerful, use less energy, and run much cooler then the Diamondville three-chip Atom platform currently found in most netbooks.

Digitimes is reporting the following about the delay of Pinetrail…

Intel showcased its next-generation netbook CPU, the Atom N450, at Computex Taipei 2009, with plans to launch it later this year. But since then nothing much has been heard from major PC vendors about developing new systems based on the 45nm CPU, codenamed Pineview.

Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien has disclosed that the vendors are still awaiting the situation to clear up, as Intel has decided to delay the launch of the new CPU to early next year, so as to avoid impacting the netbook market in second-half 2009.

While delaying the new generation netbooks until 2010, long enough for the current models to hopefully sell out makes good business sense for both Intel and their partners, it is awfully frustrating to those of us who really want to see the wonders Pinetrail promises sooner rather then later.

Between the Pinetrail platform and the Snapdragon platform (and perhaps the appearance of Moorestown based MIDs), 2010 looks to be shaping up to be a fantastic year for mobile computing. 

(Sources – Digitimes, APC)

Zealot (470 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).