VR-Zone

We're fairly certain that none of our regular readers are surprised to see the arrival of Intel's Atom N2600 and N2800 Cedar Trail-M based Atom processors today, as we reported about it launching at the very end of the year over a month ago. That said, no products will be available for at least a couple of weeks, although we'd expect that the first Cedar Trail-M netbooks will be shown off at CES.

We've also covered most of the specifications of the N2600 and N2800 Atom processors in the past, but we'll do a brief re-cap here. The N2800 is a 1.86GHz part with its graphics core clocked at 640MHz and it supports DDR3 memory at speeds of up to 1066MHz. The N2600 on the other hand is clocked at 1.6GHz with a 400MHz graphics clock and it only supports slower 800MHz DDR3 memory. One other major difference is that the N2600 can be cooled passively thanks to its 5W peak TDP, although Intel is apparently claiming an average power consumption of the processor and the NM10 chipset of under 2W, whereas the N2800 has a TDP of 8W, although average power is meant to be less than 2.7W.

As we've already reported, Intel only managed to concoct DX9 drivers for the platform, at least as far as Windows 7 is concerned, but we can apparently still expect a doubling of the 3D graphics performance over the previous generation of Atom processors. Not that this is going to make a huge difference for most netbook users, but at least there should be a decent increase in performance for casual gamers. More interesting then is hardware decode support for H.264 video and support for Intel's WiDi, albeit only at 600p.

According to Anandtech we can expect to see Cedar Trail-M netbooks with a starting price point of as little as US$199-229 and part of the reason for this is that Intel itself has reduced the price of the Atom processors compared to the previous generation. That said, these machines are likely to be very basic and lack features such as WiDi. Intel's partners are apparently Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba and we've already seen examples of models from Asus and Samsung, despite the latter promising to pull out of the netbook market in 2012.

Still, we'd rather pay a little bit more for an AMD Brazos powered machine, despite not having seen final hardware based on Cedar Trail-M, as AMD is likely to have the upper hand in terms of performance even though Intel has finally gotten Atom to the kind of level where it should have been from the beginning. Intel might have a more power efficient option on offer, but there simply are too many things missing to make Cedar Trail-M a competitive platform.

Source: Intel