Intel Buzz With New chip news on Monday; Faster netbooks are on the way

Intel is about to bring some extra performance to netbooks. The company is expected to release a souped-up version of its “PineTrail” Atom processor on Monday, according to a post on CNET’s nanotech blog, which cited unnamed sources.

Netbooks, lower in cost and smaller in size, have compromised performance to deliver better power consumption. Pine Trail, which was announced last year, takes the graphics function that was previously on a separate chip and puts it into the central processing unit. From the CNET post: Major PC makers are expected to announce new products or product refreshes with the new processor, the N470, which will be identical to the current 1.66GHz N450 but get bumped to a speed of 1.83GHz, according to a source familiar with the announcement.