Mooly Eden, general manager of the Mobile Platforms Group at Intel, says the upcoming Pine Trail generation Atom will not be delayed, and it is on schedule to launch later this year.

Recently there has been much talk about vendors not being to keen to embrace the new chips, as they are currently focusing on CULV-based thin and light notebooks rather than netbooks. The fact that Pine Trail will only offer a marginal performance boost doesn't help either.

The new Atom is a two chip platform with an integrated memory controller, and it offers a significantly reduced footprint and TDP compared to the existing N270/945 combo. It will even allow vendors to come up with passive netbooks, but this doesn't seem to be making much of an impression on decision makers, who would rather stick to the current platform for a few more months.

Pine Trail shipments are expected in volume later this year, probably in early to mid Q4.

More here.