Digital Home Thoughts: Atom Update Due in October

"Codenamed Pine Trail, Intel's 45nm Atom N450 will be a single-core CPU with built-in northbridge functions, and will be paired with the new NM10 (Tiger Point) chipset."

The new Atom looks to update much of the infrastructure around the Atom CPU itself and supposedly also gives the whole setup the ability to display 1080p video. This mostly seems like an evolutionary upgrade for Intel though it will probably be just enough to keep lots of manufacturers from jumping ship for an alternative solution like the NVidia ION platform. It is good to see progress being made, however small, but outside of improved graphics performance, I am not sure if the netbook/nettop CPU industry really has that much excitement left in it. Manufacturers seem to have found the netbook sweet spot for size, and can only really differentiate themselves with design now. The race to the top does not seem to concern most people. Now it is a race to the longest battery life!