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CES came a little earlier than expected for netbook and nettop fans, Intel unveiled Pine Trail in December instead of at CES.  It looks like Clarkdale and Arrandale will be center stage at CES instead.

I had the opportunity to test the desktop/nettop version of Pine Trail, the new Atom D510 with its NM10 Express Chipset.  Performance on average improved by between 5 - 10% across the board; the platform is noticeably faster than the previous dual core Atom 330.  In fact, on the desktop, Pine Trail is faster than NVIDIA’s Ion in anything that doesn’t require H.264 decode acceleration.

I include the caveat because Pine Trail includes no support for H.264 decode acceleration, yielding a significant feature advantage to Ion.  Intel’s solution is to encourage vendors to use a 3rd party H.264 decoder chip, similar to what’s used in Blu-ray players.  Unfortunately those solutions don’t appear to accelerate Flash video, so Pine Trail still comes up a bit shorthanded.

Atom 330 (left) vs. Atom D510 (right)

Power consumption is down quite a bit as well.  The NM10 Express chipset uses a lot less power than the old 945GC used on the first Atom based nettops thanks to the memory controller and GPU core moving onto the 45nm CPU die.

While performance improves a bit on the desktop/nettop side, the netbook version of Pine Trail - the Atom N450, isn’t quite as impressive.  We tested ASUS’ EeePC 1005PE and found that it didn’t offer any tangible performance benefits over earlier Atom N280 based netbooks.  The advantage in the netbook space is all power though, we found the 1005PE could deliver around 10 hours of useful battery life on a single charge.

Intel currently limits Pine Trail to single core only in netbooks, that means you’ll have to make a choice between battery life and performance in your next netbook.  Pine Trail will give you a long battery life but it’s still a slow single core design in netbooks.  ASUS’ recently announced EeePC 1201N combines a dual core Atom with NVIDIA’s Ion chipset.

Then again you could always go CULV and have the best of both worlds.