Intel Announces Dual-Core Atom CPUs, Super-Thin Canoe Lake Netbook, and New Win 7 Tablet Platform

It’s about time. Today at Computex, Intel finally took the wraps off of its next-generation Atom chips for netbooks. Sporting dual cores and DDR3 memory support, the”Pine Trail Dual Core” CPUs will start appearing in systems in time for the holiday season. The new CPUs should offer vastly improved performance for content creation (ex: encoding video), multitasking, and video playback, while still offering strong battery life.

In addition to Dual Core Pine Trail, Intel announced the immediate availability of the Atom N455 and N475, which like the N450 and N470 before them, run at 1.66-GHz and 1.83-GHz respectively, but use DDR3 memory instead of the older DDR2 standard.

So what’s that really thin netbook above all about?

With the new dual core Atom CPUs, comes a new cooling technology Intel has codenamed “Canoe Lake.” Though the company has not explained exactly how it works, Canoe Lake allows OEMs to create notebooks that are 50-percent thinner than a typical Atom netbook today. The picture below shows just how thin a prototype Canoe Lake system can be, a mere 0.5 inches.

After last month’s Intel Atom Z6xx announcement, we were left wondering what plans, if any, Intel had for Windows 7-based tablets. The Atom Z6xx rolled out conspicuously excluding support for the world’s most popular operating system. So what are OEMs like MSI and ASUS, who each announced new Windows 7 tablets yesterday, supposed to do? Today, Intel announced that later this year it will be shipping a new series of Windows 7-compatible tablet chips that are codenamed “Oak Trail” and promise to dramatically improve the performance of tablets and MIDs using Microsoft’s OS.

Intel’s strategy with the announcement of dual core Atom and Oak Trail CPUs is to add significant performance to the low end of its arsenal, just as it increased computing power dramatically on the high-end with the Core i3 / i5 / i7 CPUs it relased at CES 2010. Intel also expects the Atom platform to power other devices like TVs or in-car navigation systems. The theme of this year’s Intel advertising at the show is “Atom Everywhere” and as we walk the show floor, we expect to see just that.