LAPTOP GALLERIES

We recently reported on ASUS plans for a new netbook featuring Intel’s new Atom N2600 Cedar Trail processor, built on a 32 nm technology. Netbook news offers a quick comparison of the new Intel chip against the N570 and AMD C50 CPUs, the most obvious competitors to the low-voltage N2600. Official specs for the N2600 have not yet been released by Intel, but so far we know the N2600 is a dual-core hyper-threaded CPU, clocked at 1.6GHz. That’s a fair step up from the standard netbook processor line of single-core hyper-threaded processors, and the new chip features Intel HD 3600 integrated graphics, which runs at 400MHz and is DirectX 10.1 compatible. It looks as though the N2600 will only support a maximum of 2GB DDR3 RAM.

On test is the very same ASUS Eee PC X101CH, expected to launch in January, and proudly spring a Cedar Trail N2600 PCU. Flash 720p video and YouTube are thankfully both playable and thanks to the latest version of Intel’s impressive on-board graphics solutions, the N2600 manages 1080p HD playback well, provided it’s stored locally rather than being streamed from elsewhere.

The new ASUS netbook is fan-less, so it’s virtually noiseless, but that has meant the N2600 had to be built to low-voltage, and therefore lower performance, specifications. You have to look at the bigger picture when comparing this processor to the competition.

The N570 outperforms the N2600 on raw CPU benchmarks, but state-of-the-art Intel integrated graphics means the N2600 is much faster overall, especially for everyday tasks like surfing, office suites or photo-editing. Experts estimate that Intel’s current Pine Trail HD3000 integrated graphics are about equal in performance to a mid-range dedicated graphics card from a couple of years ago, so the ASUS Eee PC X101CH is a great deal more powerful than the last generation of netbooks. All of which means widespread reports of the death of the netbook may well have been greatly exaggerated. When lined up next to AMD’s C-50 CPU, results are mixed however overall the C-50 shades it. Which is all the more reason to hold off buying until we see netbooks offering the N2600 big brother, the 1.86GHz N2800, which also offers a superior graphics processor too?