New Intel Atom N450 not much improvement from old one

Intel announced the next generation of their low-powered processor, Intel Atom. Codenamed Pine Trail, Intel Atom N450 still sports a 1.66GHz speed but with a new platform that they claim improves performance and reduces power consumption.

Engadget did a review on an Asus Eee PC 1005PE that is using the new Atom chip but they reported that there’s not much of real-world improvement from netbooks using the old Intel Atom. Performance wise it’s still almost the same and the new graphics controller (Intel GMA 3150) which is supposed to support HD is quite choppy when viewing YouTube HD.

The only noticeable improvement is the battery life when running the new Intel Atom N450. Using the same 6-cell battery that gives old netbooks 8 hours of real-world computing, the Atom N450 can easily stretch that to 10 hours.

The Intel Atom N450 is still a worthy upgrade from the old one with just the battery improvement alone. Price-wise, it won’t differ much from those netbooks with Atom N270/N280 so I would rather go with the N450.

[Engadget]