Intel has began to ship their new Atom CPU the Intel Atom N280 to manufacturers. Although the clock speed of the new N280 is only 0.06Ghz faster than the N270 at 1.66GHz it’s front side bus runs at a faster 667MHz allowing to to connect faster to the system’s components for significant speed performance increases.
Along with higher performance, the Atom N280 also has a boost in the graphics area also, being able to hardware decode 720p HD video content, while drawing less power. The new GN40 chipset features a hardware based HD video decoder, providing high definition playback.
Intel originally aimed the Atom CPU for netbooks to run basic tasks such as surfing and low power productivity applications, but with the new N280 allow people to enjoy enhanced media applications. Nvidia also saw the need for improved media performance of netbooks, and have introduced the Nvidia Ion platform.
Although the Atom N280 is more powerful than the N270, it still uses only 2.5 watts of power. It’s great to see netbooks evolving, personally I would love a netbook to be able to decode HD without any problems and feature an HDMI output for connecting to an HDTV.
Intel Atom N280 Netbooks
The Atom N280 will be featured on some new netbooks, we will keep the listed updated here.
- Asus Eee PC 1000HE
- Asus Eee PC 1002H
- Acer Aspire One D150 | Higher models only (D150-2BG)
Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 2:15 pm
News