Intel Atom N455 and N475 processors to bring DDR3 support

When i say that Intel’s new Pine Trail platform was a bit of a disappointment for many, I’m not exaggerating. We expected somehow better performance levels from the new processors, but that wasn’t the case.

Still, the folks at Intel announced they are continuously working on improving their Atom platform. And now they announced support for DDR3 memory on their Atom CPUs later this year, with the new Atom N455 (1.66 GHz – 5.5W TDP) and N475 (1.83 GHz – 6.5W TDP) processor. However, this is just a baby step, don’t expect a huge difference in performance. Still, implementing DDR3 on netbooks will come with a couple of advantages:

• DDR3 only work with FSBs starting from 800 MHz, thus the new processors will be a little faster (The N450 currently runs on a 667 MHz FSB)
• DDR3 memory will get cheaper than DDR2
• DDR3 memory is less power hungry than DDR2

So overall, we’ll get slightly faster processors that will consume less energy (and provide better battery life), all for better prices.

According to Fudzilla, Intel plans to launch the new CPUs in the third quarter of 2010, thus we should expect some new laptops by the end of the year. But just don’t get too enthusiastic, they won’t be too much different from the current PineTrail equipped devices that were just launched in January.

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Tags: Intel Atom, Pine Trail

Last updated: March 23, 2011 | Published: February 6th, 2010 | Add the first comment!