Intel Atom Pine Trail M Platform Revealed

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Intel’s Atom processors are featured in most netbooks you’ll purchase. They’re cheap and powerful enough for web browsing pleasure, but they have one notorious problem, and that’s running Flash 10.1 and 1080p video. Intel is addressing this with a new generation of Pine Trail chips, dubbed Pine Trail M.

Intel’s Pine Trail M Atom processors will use an HD decoder chip from Broadcom, another processor company that primarily focuses on integrated circuits. Although Intel it isn’t like Intel is going to ARM or AMD for their chips, it still is a little strange that the world’s largest chip manufacturer is going to another instead of developing their own.

The Pine Trail M Atom processors will use a Broadcom BMC70015 HD decoder chip. This new decoder chip won’t be included on the die, instead, it’ll be up to the computer manufacturers to purchase and include these chips on their motherboard. This seems like a pretty lackluster solution from Intel, but considering the Atom’s inability to smoothly play Flash 10.1 video as well as some with specialized Flash players like Hulu, it should be quick.

Website Fudzilla predict this solution of throwing a Broadcom HD chip on the motherboard will be considerably cheaper than NVIDIA’s Ion 2 graphics solution for netbooks. Although, as they point out, the Ion 2 could provide graphics power for gaming and other applications while the Broadcom decoder will simply help with HD video and flash.

Unfortunately for prospective netbook buyers, Fudzilla reports that Intel isn’t planning to start shipping the Pine Trail M processors until the end of 2011, almost two years away.