Digital Home Thoughts: PineTrail and the ASUS PC1005PE; Better, Faster, Sorta, Kinda

"The Atom N450 processor has been launched today and it's comprised of a single core Atom chip with on-die graphics and memory controller. This level of integration, as we've shown you recently, is also coming to Intel's notebook platforms, but today Atom gets it first for netbooks. In the pages ahead we'll take a closer look at a new Eee PC from Asus with this new low-power Atom technology under its hood, as well as a view of the chip itself and its capabilities."

With the exception of ION, netbooks have been rather boring lately. All of them have a 8.9 inch to 10 11 12 inch screen, single core Atom CPU, HDD, webcam, WiFi and a base OS. While PineTrail will not revolutionize anything, it will raise the minimum bar a little with slightly better CPU and GPU performance. You still will not be able to handle HD video, or play any current generation game, but it does run faster overall, and manages to do so while not really changing the power requirements, which means the netbooks of tomorrow will still be able to run for most of the day. Overall, I think its nice that Intel has updated the platform, but it is much ado about nothing, and NVidia's ION and ION2 stand to make much more of a difference in the netbook market.