According to a Digitimes report, Intel is planning to launch a new Atom CPU no earlier than October.

Dubbed Atom N450, the new processor will replace the N270 used in most netbooks today. Unlike the N270, the N450 has some built-in northbridge functions, and the entire platform will consist of only two chips, unlike the current platform which has three. The new 45nm CPU will be coupled with the Tiger Point chipset, designated NM10.

Obviously the new two-chip design will be less power hungry, and due to its compact size it will allow manufacturers to come up with thinner, lighter netbooks, and possible even some new form factors. However, we still don’t know the clocks and don’t have any performance details.

Digitimes claims Intel will issue a last order notice for the N270 in Q1 2010, and it will cease production sometime in 1H 2010. It is still a unclear what will happen to Silverthorne and Poulsbo, or should we say Z-series Atoms and the US15W chipset.

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AMD CEO Dirk Meyer says the company is working on a new low-power mobile platform which could take on Intel’s Atom. Samples should ship sometime in 2010.

However, Meyer, who believes netbooks will fade away as a separate product category, says the new chips will be used for notebooks, not netbooks. The important thing to point out is that AMD expects the new platform to end up cheaper than the Atom, and in this ultra-cheap market segment, even a slight price difference could mean a lot. Another thing AMD has going for it is its prowess in IGP design.

Meyer also said AMD is developing a new platform for thin and light notebooks, which will be positioned between Congo and Yukon. He also believes ARM-based netbooks will have a tough time penetrating the netbook market, as they lack proper software support, i.e. Microsoft won’t port Windows for such devices.

Also, AMD will soon launch a new mainstream mobile platform, codenamed Tigris.

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Since Flash obviously isn’t easy on the CPU which of course reflects on netbooks’ battery life, Nvidia and Broadcom announced full hardware Flash acceleration by upgrading Adobe’s plugin resulting in smooth playback of HD flash video and lower CPU usage.

Unfortunately, these improvements will initially run only on Nvidia’s Tegra solutions or Atom netbooks with Broadcom’s Crystal HD video acceleration add-on. This means that it’ll take a while before we see this in action and even longer before it becomes a mainstream feature.

We’re likely to see some other Flash acceleration announcements as well, but until we see this feature in action we can’t say more.

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The Serial ATA International Organization has finally made the third-generation SATA interface official. It provides maximum transfer speed of 6 Gb/s and comes with many other enhancements as well.

The new SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible with all the previous standards. The new enhancements or features, if you like to call them like that, include a new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command for isochronous data transfers, NCQ Management that optimizes performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands, improved power management capabilities, a small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for 1.8-inch drives, a connector for 7mm optical disk drives for thin and light notebooks, and alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard.

We already saw some draft versions of the standard, and we are quite sure that some manufacturers will show their first SATA 6Gbps devices at Computex.

Dell has released a new server, codenamed Fortuna, which in itself wouldn’t be big news if it weren’t for its VIA Nano powerplant.

Based around a 15W CPU which is better suited to netbooks and nettops, the new XS11-VX8 server boasts power consumption of just 20-29W. Although it might seem a bit underpowered compared to most servers, it’s also quite a bit greener, and cheaper, too. The Nano is a 64-bit CPU, and it even offers some virtualization support.

Another advantage is the tiny form factor. The new server is just slightly larger than a 3.5-inch drive, and Dell says you can pack up to six Fortunas per rack unit, or 252 of them in a a 42U rack. Best of all, even getting a bunch of them won’t cost you too much, as Dell is offering them for as low as $400.

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It was only last week that Intel received the biggest fine of its corporate life for violating EU antitrust laws in a case with AMD. Not to mention, the other side of the picture rests in the fact that Nvidia has also been complaining about Intel’s Atom pricing structure, and is probably still shaken by the anti-ION propaganda in recent months.

With all backs turned against it, the blue chipmaker is now turning to Broadcom for its HD video processing needs on the Atom “Pine Trail” netbook platform that will be released in Q4. According to a few netbook manufacturers, Intel plans to offer the Broadcom BCM70015 graphics chip as an option to its partners on Pine Trail, which features support for popular codecs such as AVC, H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG2. The other strong feature of this chip is the fact that it can easily run Windows XP, Windows 7 and Linux at relatively low power.

The chip itself has a die area of 10mm² and consumes 30mW when idling. When playing 720p HD content, it consumes a little under 500mW and for 1080p HD content just under 1W. This is actually better than Nvidia’s Tegra, which consumes 100mW when idling and around 2W when decoding at full power.

During an Intel investor meeting Tuesday, the company’s head of marketing said netbooks cost some retailers dearly last summer, as they experienced huge return rates due to misinformative marketing on their part.

“In the first period–June, July, August of last year, there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as notebooks,” said Sean Maloney. “They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there, it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster.”

So, basically, they were to blame, not Intel. Maloney claims Intel later approached the retail chains and advised them to market netbooks differently, clearly state up front what they can and can’t do, and this seems to have remedied the problem.

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During the last financial conference call, he told investors that a lot of people are doing video editing of their family videos that they want to send to their parents. Some cutting and editing, and especially rendering and transcoding of edited HD videos can take hours.

If you have a Cuda based application, or in the future a DirectX compute API enabled application in Windows 7, you should be able to do the video editing up to 5 or more times faster than with a CPU alone.

This is a big difference and Nvidia hopes that a lot of people will realize this. This is what makes Intel angry as the computer of today can really benefit a GPU for something other than just playing. Let’s just hope that Nvidia can pull this one off.

Nvidia’s product manager for Tesla producs, Sumit Gupta, recently said how new programming environments will utilize GPUs to accelerate software in OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems. Nvidia seems to be keen on proving the world that graphics cards are not solely for gaming, and thus the GPGPU acronym (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).

OpenCL, a framework for writing programs which execute across platform containing CPUs, GPUs and potentially other processors, would enable users to more effectively utilize the potential that GPUs obviously pack, and even Apple on its website says that OpenCL will make it possible for developers to „efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.“

In a nutshell, this means that graphics do so much more in the future, as having a CPU and a GPU in your system will mean there’re two workhorses to rely on, where both processing units will work together and divide the tasks among themselves. An example was cited as running Google’s Picasa on the CPU, but as soon as you choose an image and apply a filter, the GPU would take over.

Since interfaces in our OSs are obviously visual, it would make more sense for the GPU to handle it than the CPU Mr. Gupta also said. However, this doesn’t in any way mean that CPUs are not needed as he also added how „If you’re running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades“.

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Of all the GPU horror stories we’ve witnessed over the years, they have been very few and far from the one spotted today. According to Skydive from the EVGA Forums, his brand new GTX 295 Quad-SLI setup is emitting just the right frequencies in the RF spectrum to interfere with his garage door openers.

He claims that the problem resolves itself when he shuts off his system and notes that the problem never occurred in the past with any other GPUs, all while using the same power supply unit. He also mentioned that the system, located in his office room, is on another circuit from the garage’s power, so the problem is certainly not likely to be an outside variable.

The observation at hand begs the question of just how valid the FCC’s safety and electromagnetic interference rating approvals might be. We know that EM fields can do strange things, but as Skydive states, “[the card] has to be pushing acceptable levels by the FCC if it can jam your garage door remotes.”

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