INTEL WILL LAUNCH ATOM N280 ON SECOND HALF OF FEBRUARY

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The N280 + GN40 is nothing more than an “off roadmap” offering from Intel. It is probably been put in place to offset some of the damage being done by nVidia’s ION platform.

It is understood that, Intel plans to launch in late February a new Atom N280 processor, still using 45-nanometer Diamondville core, but the core clock up to 1.66GHz, the front-end convergence Pai was also upgraded to 667MHz, the same built-in 512KB L2 Cache, Support Hyper-Threading technology, capable of supporting two treatment Threading.

In addition, Intel has also introduced a new chipset GN40 match this Atom N280 processor, GN40-based Intel GM4x IGP chipset design, built-in GMA 4000 graphics core, Intel positioned to match this "Enhanced Media Netbook", in the performance Intel 945GSE than would have greatly improved to meet the 7 ~ 10-inch display and 800 x 400 ~ 1024 x 600 resolution of the needs of 3D gaming and, more importantly, to support the HD high-definition decoding, supporting H.264, VC-1 and MPEG 2 encoding, but the maximum support 720p or 1080p, has yet to be announced.

The Atom N280 is simply nothing more than a speed bump over the N270, although with a faster bus speed. The next generation Atom processor will be the Pineview which should launch later this year, our guess is at Computex in early June. The N280 can either be paired up with the old 945GSE chipset in what Intel calls an off-roadmap solution to gives its partners a differentiating factor and a small performance bump.