Intel released the faster version of “Pine Trail” Atom processor for netbooks, on February 29. Back then it wasn’t much of surprise, mostly because some PC makers, like Lenovo, Gigabyte and others, made the error to show off products with the N470 chip on their websites, only to remove this product pages shortly after that.
The new “Pine Trail” Atom processor broth a little extra performance to the popular segment of the laptop market. The Intel Atom N470 is clocked at 1.83GHz, therefore is a bit faster than the 1.66GHz Atom N450 chip found in a wide range of netbooks.
The Atom N470 platform combines the processor and the graphics controller on a single chip, exactly like the N450. The Atom N470 is still a single core processor, but it has support for hyper-threading technology.
Hyper-threading was first introduced with Intel Pentium 4 processors for the desktop market. By using this technology, the processor can calculate two threads at the same time by filling the stalls or gaps that the first thread is facing. Bottom line its porpoise is to keep the processor busy at all times, because every cycle lost without some calculations being made is a waste of time and energy. Coupled with the clock frequency increase it is expected to bring some performance boost depending on the application being used.
The Atom N470 processor was intended to be used on the same market as its predecessor, netbooks typically priced lower than $350, but it didn’t had much success because the performance difference is small. Atom processors have a low power consumption, thereby achieving greater battery life time, but its performance isn’t a match for Core 2 Duo or the new Core i processors used in mainstream laptops, that offer more processing power and therefore slightly lower battery time.
Atom N470 was a bit hungrier than the Atom N450 chip which had an influence on the overall battery life, probably one of the reasons manufacturers didn’t used it very much. One other reason would be a higher price per chip, the N450 being a more accessible option.
Netbooks based on Intel Atom N470 won’t have much success from now on either especially with the new Intel CULV processors to be released in Q3 this year, with more processing power and power efficient enough for around 7-8 hours of battery life.
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