Looking back at the year 2011, we didn’t see much activity in the netbook market except for the release of the “Brazos” platform
from AMD. Those “Brazos” processors, specially the AMD E-350, really shook the netbook market because of their powerful (for a netbook) graphics capabilities. Playing 1080p HD movies seamlessly on a netbook was made possible because of AMD’s efforts.

Sadly after AMD’s new offerings to the netbook market were realeased there were no more new significant updates. I was beginning to think that this year might not really that flashy for netbooks until…

Just this last week of December Intel officially announced that the new platform for the Atom line, Cedar Trail, is already available and will be released by netbook manufacturers on the 1st quarter of 2012.

Cedar Trail is more or less the same as the current Atom platform, Pine Trail, because the use the same NM10 Chipset but the CPU for the Cedar Trail line is manufactured using the 32nm process which means that these CPU’s can deliver more processing performance without drawing more power.

There are currently 2 Cedar Trail CPU’s for the netbook genre namely the N2600 and the N2800 that are clocked at 1.6Ghz and 1.86 and TDP (Thermal Design Point) of 3.5 watts and 6.5 watts respectively. They are packed with 1MB of L2 cache and armed with the GMA 3600/3650 graphics chipset which Intel said can double the graphics performance of its predecessors.

I think it is still early to call it quits on the netbook industry especially now Intel has officially given an answer to AMD’s APUs. A few months from now we will be able to see how these two platforms perform head to head against each other and we’ll be able to decide whose processor will be king of netbook land.

Related posts:

1. New Netbook Launches on Hold from Asus and Acer