Intel has big plans to speed up the Atom processor development, according to word received from an Intel executive. More popularly known as tiny and lightweight processing chips for netbooks, Intel's Atom is currently in the spotlight for further enhancements. Now, the company is focusing on boosting up its speed. Intel's EVP Steve Maloney also says that they plan to make the Atom processor work thrice as fast. Apparently, Intel does intend to speed things up. During the debut of the Atom on netbooks, the intent was on focused on power efficiency for lightweight computing that you can use for several hours. Now, you’ve got the company boosting the technology used in the manufacturing process. The following year, it plans to introduce a whole new micro architecture processor.

Makeover Mission

The name of the game is "Pine Trail", which is actually a technology code that is slated to be released either in the last month of this year or at the latest, early 2010. Pine Trail boasts of allowing the graphics function to be right onto the actual CPU itself, which is a first for the company. So how do we benefit from this new chip? Intel execs say everyone should expect two things: a better battery life and top notch performance like we’ve never seen before. It seems as if Intel is feeling that the time is ripe to introduce yet another processor speed for the widely successful Atom chip, which was able to hold its own for more than a year now. Makes you wonder what marvels are in store for light notebooks that are currently running on a 1.6 GHz speed in the future.

And to make things extra-delish, the company will also add extra processing cores. Hold your horses though – while Atom is very far away from being dual core, you can expect the light and speedy factor already built-in to low-cost high-function nettops. However, Intel admits to the possibility of a dual-core Atom in the (not-so-near) future for as long as the needs of the market will track their product research into that particular avenue.

Which is Which?

Extra power, extra battery life – is a netbook still a netbook, then? Weaving carefully on the fine line of netbooks and notebooks, Intel ought to operationally define system power for both classes. For the moment, it's already got its popular dual-core laptop processors which are power efficient (such as the SU4100 ULVP and the SU7300 Core 2 Duo). Such amazing little wonders are busying themselves working ultrathin laptops for more than 10 hours of battery life (which is already more than enough to get your through your workday plus a few overtime hours if you wish).

The architecture of this processor, however, remains to be theoretically different compared to the Atom. The same is also true even if you do get to compare it with a (hypothetical) dual-core Atom. When such happens, we can probably foresee a bit of confused shuffling in terms of notebook and netbook prices. But for the netbook equivalent at the moment, we can only wait with bated breath.

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