Legit Processor Reviews

Intel Launches Pine Trail Technology for Atom Netbooks

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: Atom N450 - Pineview
Date: Mon, Dec 21, 2009 - 08:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Intel Pine Trail Technology Launches

Today Intel officially unveils the newly updated Atom architecture previously known as Pine Trail. A number of months ago it was rumored that the Intel Atom Pine Trail  platform would be launched at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show  (CES) in Las Vegas next month, but as you can tell that is not what ultimately happened.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 1

Pine Trial has been dubbed the next generation of Intel Atom processors as it will bring both performance and power consumption improvements to the rapidly growing market of netbooks and nettops.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 2

With the launch of Pine Trail comes three new processors and of course a new chipset. The processor that you will be most likely interested in is the Intel Atom N450, which is now the must have processor in the netbook market.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Die

Intel Atom N450 (Pineview) Specifications:

  • Core Frequency: 1.66GHz
  • DMI Speed - 2.5Gbps
  • TDP (Thermal Design Power) - <10W
  • Stepping - A 
  • Number of CPU Cores - 1 (2 Threads w/ HT) 
  • Integrated Memory Controller 
  • Integrated DirectX 9 Graphics Processor 
  • L2 Cache - 512KB 
  • 45nm High-K 
  • PC99 Suspend To RAM Support
  • Execute Disable Bit (XD) Enabled 
  • Intel 64 Technology 
  • Packaging -  MicroFCBGA8

Looking at the Intel Atom N450 'Pineview' Processor specifications the first thing that might jump out at you is that the clock frequency is still at 1.66Ghz. This is the same clock speed and cache amount found on the current Intel Atom Processors like the N280. So, what makes the Intel Atom N450 such a great advancement for netbooks? The processor itself now contains integrated graphics known as the the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150!

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 4

This means that the Intel Atom N450 doesn't need a chipset with graphics as DirectX 9 video is already built-in. By reducing the needed chipsets from three down to just 2 that means netbooks will consume less power and that more real estate on the motherboard is available for other things.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 6

Intel says that the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 is able to do some HD video playback, but for full HD playback support a third-party chip like Broadcom's BCM70015 decoder is needed for silky smooth playback. The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 is also able to support resolutions of up to 1366x768, which is nice as many of the original Intel Atom netbooks only went up to a resolution of 1024x600 on the integrated Intel 945GSE Graphics.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 1

This all adds up to some very impressive numbers that are due to mainly the graphics being integrated into the processor. As you can see in the slide above the average power savings for netbooks is around 20% on average with a 60% reduction in package size thanks to the netbook only need two chipsets instead of three. In case you are curious the package size in netbooks went from 35mm x 35mm to just 22mm x 22mm.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 1

The new Intel Atom N450 processor runs at a clock frequency of 1.66 GHz and consists of a single physical core that supports HyperThreading technology. The newly integrated memory controller is capable of supporting DRAM speefs of up to DDR2-667 speeds and most importantly the N450 has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of just 5.5W. For comparison sake the Intel Atom 330 has a TDP of 8W. Those that are looking at nettop or desktop solutions with the new 'pineview' based processors will have the D410 and D510 to pick from. The D410 is nearly identical to the N450, but features support for faster memory since battery life is not an issue. The D510 is the fastest of the bunch as it is a dual-core processor and has twice the amount of cache.

Intel Pine Trail Atom Processor Slide 3

The Intel Pine Trail platform looks fairly solid with the exception of HD video playback. With HD video content clearly being the direction that the market is headed it would be nice to be able to playback HD content right our of the box with no issues moving into 2010. Not having native hardware H.264 or VC-1 decoding is a disappointment, but at least the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 has hardware acceleration for MPEG-2. The NVIDIA Ion platform can do it and the upcoming Ion 2 platform will continue to give the NVIDIA Ion chipset a reason to be bought since the Intel Atom platform suffers on HD video decode performance. The nice thing about Pine Trail is that the two chip design will open up more space for third-party HD video decoders, which is key to the advancement of netbooks in general.

Legit Reviews does not have a Pine Trail platform to do any testing on, but a number of reviews have been posted today that shows off performance of the new Intel Atom N450 processor.  Here is a list of review sites that we trust that have reviews up:

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