The Atom 270 will soon be on the way out. We've known that for a few days now. What we haven't known is what exactly Intel intends to replace their still-fairly-new Atom chip with. Well today we have confirmation that Intel's next little-big thing is going to be a next-generation Atom platform, codenamed Pine Trail.

The Pine Trail processor, known only as Pineview at the moment, will hold both the memory controller and the GPU. This will decrease the number of chips required by the Atom platform down to two. What does this mean for you? Well for one thing, it means smaller and more powerful netbooks that can last a lot longer on battery power.

Portable processor technology is growing at a such a fast pace that it's almost unbelievable. It seems like just a few months ago the Atom 270 was the top of the line for power and price. Now it's being phased out for an even smaller, even beefier GPU.

This means a couple of things for netbooks. For one, they're going to get even thinner. As it stands 8.9" is about as tiny a screen as most consumers want to use, so I doubt any manufacturers are going to try to make their monitors much smaller. I think we'll see most companies take advantage of Pineview by offering even longer-lasting netbooks, and netbooks with much more RAM and storage space, to make up for the smaller processor.

We should see the first few models of this next generation of netbooks as early as this September, when the 270 starts to get phased out. Hopefully by Christmas we'll have a decent selection of Pine Trail netbooks out on the market.