Intel’s new Pine Trail chips (launching in January) are going to be getting an added performance boost sometime mid-2010. That is when their model numbers will be upgraded from the Atom N450 and N470 to N45x and N47x to siginify their new-found support for DDR3 RAM.
The new chips will already be a big improvement over current Atom models, and when the supported memory goes from DDR2 to DDR3 we can expect to see another jump in performance. This will be even more exaggerated due to the new architecture having both the CPU and GPU on a single chip, and having faster available memory will greatly add to processing efficiency.
The N470 chip (1.87GHz) will be going into full production in mid-January, while the N450 chip (1.67GHz) is already in netbooks and waiting for a January release.
