14 DAY TRIAL // Companies have been eagerly introducing, or offering, previews of the products that will be on display at CeBIT 2010, with a host of motherboards, graphics cards, memory products and PCs, among other things, having already been formally detailed. Intel had also been planning on introducing its Atom N470 processor today. However, in a rather queer turn of events, the Santa Clara chip giant's March 1st press release somehow managed to come out on February 27th.
The so-called “revelation” of the CPU was done via Intel's Chip Shots PR blog, where it is also revealed that the company expects OEMs to start showcasing and releasing netbooks based on the new processor during the coming months. Of course, the Intel Atom N470 was hardly a mystery. The development of the processor, along with the company's plans to launch it at the beginning of March, have been known since as far back as October 2009.
This central processing unit is a stronger version of the Atom N450, which has already been adopted in most of the latest netbooks. The newer CPU, while being based on the 45nm manufacturing process technology, has a single core running at 1.83GHz. The chip is part of the Pine Trail platform, has 512k of L2 cache memory and supports DDR2-667 memory modules. These higher specs, compared with those of its sibling, will enable a generation of stronger netbooks.
The Intel Atom N470 also comes with the GMA 3150 integrated graphics, offering the full feature set needed by any low-cost, entry-level mobile PC. One of such products will likely be Lenovo's IdeaPad S10-3t convertible tablet. Unfortunately, the product listing that previously existed can no longer be found on the company's web store, although it should be restored soon, this very week perhaps, considering that the CPU is now official.