There have been conflicting reports on the internet about the release of the successor of Atom codenamed Pine Trail, with some claiming that it wont see the light until 2010. Of course those reports caused some big name manufacturers to revise their product lineup which includes Acer and ASUS. Now Intel has announced that the release is on schedule and it will happen in 2009.
For those who don't already know, Pine Trail is the first evolution of Intel's highly popular Atom platform which powers most of the netbooks out there. The new platform would move the graphics processor and the memory controller from the chipset on to the CPU die which would greatly improve performance. While speaking to the media at the Intel Technology Summit in San Francisco, Intel's General Manager of Mobile Platforms Group said:
Pine Trail is on schedule. You can quote me on that... The three chip solution down to two chip solution [is] coming this year.
That pretty much throws all those other rumors out of the window, but still leaves a couple of open questions. Like when is the actual release going to happen and will we see any netbooks based on the new chip because ASUS and Acer have already changed plans? As for the first question, the GM said:
We are going to ship revenue shipments in the second half of the year. You [can] come to IDF and see the maturity of the product.
Intel Developer Forum is usually in September so I'm guessing the release would be somewhere around late October and November. Still don't expect a lot of new netbooks by the holiday season.
