Intel Atom N450 Specs Leaves Door Open for Nvidia & Broadcom

The N450 is the new Intel Atom-based chip that will be used for the highly anticipated ‘Pineview’ netbooks in 2010. We have been seeing early previews leading up to CES over the past few weeks. We now have some documentation to lay those rumors to rest and move forward with some cold hard facts.

The N450 integrates the GPU and CPU on the same die and there have been some discussion around the area of video decoding. The technical documents that are now available make it clear. There is no H.264 or WMV decoding on board and no support for digital monitor outputs. MPEG2 decoding is supported (useful for DVB and DVD standards) but that’s about it for video. So its certainly not a GMA500 core. It’s Intel technology through and through.

Its clear that this detail may emerge as the capability that distinguishes netbooks from notebooks. You won’t be watching HD-quality Flash videos on a standard netbook. Even when Flash 10.1 is released, there’s simply no decoding hardware for it to use.

This isn’t it for netbooks, all this does is open the door for companies that specialize in graphics, Nvidia is now free to waltz in with Ion & Tegra and Broadcom is also positioned to make a move. Although if Intel get their act together with Moblin, the higher-clockrate Z200 series CPUs might be an option for video-focused netbooks.

2010 is going to be an interesting time for netbooks over the next few months as the economic concerns make the affordable nature of netbooks less appealing. Netbooks are going to have to learn to stand up to the big boys on their own merit. We already know they can, its just a matter of which players emerge victorious.

Thanks A Million to Chippy from UMPCPortal for that one!!