The Atom processor is certainly making history with its dominant position in the netbook market but as companies (VIA, ARM) are starting to try their luck, Intel is looking towards the next step in low-power processing and working away on Atom's successor, codenamed Pineview. Set to debut in the second half of this year, the 45nm-built Pineview will come, as Atom in two versions, one of them being made for the Pine Trail-M netbook platform.

Pine Trail-M is expected to be launched in Q3 2009 and it will consist of two chips - the Pineview CPU and the Tiger Point-M southbridge. The dual chip design, made possible by the fact that the Pineview processor integrates a graphics core and a DDR2 memory controller, is set to lower both costs and power requirements, with the silicon duo featuring a TDP of just 7W, 1W lower than the current Atom-powered solution. In addition to being smaller, more energy efficient and cooler, Pine Trail-M will also provide more processing power as the CPU will have a FSB of 667 MHz (533 MHz for today's Atom) and will go from 1.6 GHz up, while the DirectX 9-supporting graphics core will have a clock of 200 MHz, as opposed to 133 MHz of current implementations. Pineview and Pine Trail-M certainly look good on paper so hopefully we'll have netbooks based on them for this year's back to school season.