Boosting Pine Trail
Finally, we spoke to Narendra Sankar, architect and product line manager for the media PC segment. He told us a bit more about the BCM 70015, which is the video processor appearing in most new, Pine Trail based, netbooks.
While Intel has moved the graphics onto the same silicon as the CPU in Pine Trail, that doesn't necessarily offer any performance benefits. When Intel launched the Pine Trail platform it officially endorsed the BCM 70015.
While this will certainly have displeased NVIDIA, which offers its ION platform to boost netbook graphics, traditional Intel low power graphics partner Imagination Technologies can't have been too chuffed either.
But it must be noted that Broadcom's chips primarily help with video, as opposed to graphics, processing, so NVIDIA and Imagination still have advantages there.
