Talk, says Mooley Eden, of Intel’s Pine Trail being delayed into early 2010 is quite unfounded. According to the latest from Intel’s Mobile Platform Group general manager, “Pine Trail is on schedule. You can quote me on that … The three chip solution down to two chip solution [is] coming this year.”
Acer and ASUS are tipped to have frozen new netbook launches in the second half of 2009, in response to Intel’s decision to postpone the launch of the Pine Trail-M platform – of which the Atom N450 processor is a part – until Q1 2010. As part of that, Acer’s dual-booting Android/Windows XP netbook has been postponed with no known launch date; the netbook, first shown in prototype form at Computex in June, was most recently expected to arrive in August.
After word slipped out from Taiwan earlier this week that Intel were considering pushing back the release of the Pine Trail Atom N450 processor until the first half of 2010, now comes more specific news from PC manufacturers that both the netbook platform, Pine Trail-M, and its Pine Trail-D nettop sibling will both now arrive in the first quarter of next year. That, say the unnamed sources, will coincide with the release of Intel's 32nm Core i9 processors, codenamed Gulftown, and offering six cores.
Intel’s Pine Trail platform, set to replace the company’s current Diamondville netbook/nettop architecture, could be delayed until the first half of 2010 so as to reassure vendors. According to Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien, the Intel Atom N450 processor has been pushed back from its original Q4 2009 launch schedule so as to allow the existing netbook market to settle.
Intel's next-gen Atom platform, Pine Trail, may have been reasonably well known before now, but the CPU manufacturer has just released [PDF link] the first official details about the new netbook and nettop chips. Expected to reach the market later this year, Pine Trail's biggest change is in integrating the graphics core into the processor, slimming down both the overall size and the platform's power requirements.