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Intel has officially announced its next-generation Pine Trail Atom platform. In the coming years, these processors will replace the N270/N280 Atom chips. Among the Pine Trail chips announced include N450, D410 and D510. The N450 processors are meant for use in netbooks, whereas the D410 and D510 (dual-core) processors are nettop/desktop based. Intel also announced the NM10 Express chipset that would work alongside these processors. The Atom N470 processor has not yet been announced. All of these processors run at 1.66GHz speed.

The Pine Trail processors will consume 20% less power than the Atom N270/N280 processors used today. As a result of this they will offer better battery life and may even lead to fan-less netbook designs. Pine Trail chips are also smaller in size which will make the devices thinner and lighter. They are, however, unlikely to offer any significant improvement in performance.

The Pine Trail platform will officially launch on January 4. Already over 80 netbook models using these processors have been announced.