Intel Centrino Atom brand, uses just 'Atom'

It seems like only yesterday but it's been move than five months since Intel introduced the world to its low-power 45nm processors which it nicknamed Atom and Centrino Atom. Interestingly-enough it also took only five months for Intel to rethink its naming strategy and the result of that is the dropping of the Centrino Atom brand.

Upon release, the Centrino Atom brand was set to be used to name processors that are part of the Menlow platform and aimed at MID (Mobile Internet Devices) but since Intel has decided to simplify things a bit, they will now bear the Atom name. We can dig it.

Intel starts shipping N-series Atom CPUs

The netbook & nettop party (BEd: Or battle) has officially begun so Intel has now started to deliver two new Atom processors which are aimed at the two types of products. Coming in a 22x22 mm package (the Z-series Atoms are 13x14mm), the Atom N230 and N270 processors (codename Diamondville) are both 45nm parts clocked at 1.6 GHz, with 512kB of L2 cache and FSBs set to 533 MHz.

The N270 features a TDP of just 2W and will be used in netbooks like Asus' Eee PC, MSI's Wind, Acer's Aspire one etc while the N230, with its 4W TDP will have to settle for the less mobile but still easy to carry nettops like the Asus Eee Box. The Atom N270 will be paired up with the 945GSE chipset while the N230's partner is the 945GC.

DIY Intel Atom Computer

While we're pleased to see Intel Atom processors making their way into mobile PCs, we're just as excited to see the upcoming Atom-based creations of the PC-building community. Now Trainquil PC is selling ready-to-run motherboards with a bundled 1.6GHz Atom processor and supporting up to 2GB of memory. They promise benchmarks of 3-4x those of similar VIA systems and the capability to power Vista Home Media Center "with ease." Maybe that's a slight hyperbole, but hey, it's a heck of a quote. The board is $103 this June. Here are the full specs:

[Tranquil PC via BBGadgets]