It doesn’t matter how good you’ve been all year, Santa won’t be placing an Atom N450-based netbook under the Christmas tree this year. But on the bright side, you may not have to wait long. According to reports, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and MSI, all of which originally planned on launching Atom N450-based netbooks this month, will release the units on January 11, 2010.
The decision to hold off until then complies with their agreement with Intel to only launch the products after January 10. There will be three versions of Atom N450-based netbooks using different OSes, the most popular (and expensive) expected to be Windows 7 Starter. The other two include Moblin Linux and Windows XP Home.
Atom N450 is part of Intel’s Pine Trail platform architecture, which moves the GPU and memory controller onto the CPU die. This results in a smaller package that consumes less power. It will come clocked at 1.66GHz and sport 512KB of L2 cache, along with a 200MHz graphics clock (compared to 133MHz on the Atom N270 platform).
Image Credit: Intel
Before now, if you wanted a Core i7-based laptop, you could have one, but it had to be of the desktop variety, which meant contending with higher temps, lower battery life, and bulky form factors.
Then came this year’s IDF, in which Intel introduced its Nehalem architecture in mobile form. It didn’t take long for Dell to announce refreshed Studio 15 and Studio 17 laptops outfitted with the new chips, and now Asus and Sager are joining in on the fun.
Asus just introduced its M60J, a 16-inch notebook that comes configurable with either Intel’s 1.6GHz Core i7 720QM or 1.73GHz Core i7 820QM. It also comes with a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT240M GPU, up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 1TB of hard drive storage, optional Blu-ray, and more.
Sager, on the other hand, unveiled a 15.6-inch model (NP8690) built around the same processors, but ups the ante with a 1GB GeForce GTX 280M GPU, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB hard drive, and a 1080p display.
No word yet on how much Asus’ M60J will cost or when it will start shipping. Sager, meanwhile, will start shipping its NP8690 in October starting at $1,800.
Asus, best known for its motherboards and Eee PC lineup, doesn’t often tout its rack-mount server products, but perhaps it should. The multifaceted manufacturer on Friday added the new RS300-E6 series to its rack-mount family, pairing Intel’s Lynnfield platform in the process.
The new servers utilize Intel’s 3420 PCH chipset with the chip maker’s socket 1156-based Xeon 3400 series of CPUs. Support for both dual- and quad-core processors comes standard, and Asus says the ES300-E6 series can scale up performance immediately to support high-volume workloads.
Other notables include dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory support, 2+1 I/O expansion feature in the slim 1U form factor, PCI-E x16 and x8 slots, and support for the optional Asus Pike card, which allows for a seamless upgrade to SAS storage.
Image Credit: Asus
