Intel's N280 is officially out the door and headed for market. Intel confirmed yesterday that it's shipping the single-core processor in volume to PC manufacturers; Asus's 1000HE netbook is already available for preorder if you just can't wait for the system to hit Newegg. The N280 is unlikely to offer any performance advantage over the N270-the chip is just 67MHz faster (1667MHz vs. 1600MHz). The CPU's bus speed has increased significantly, however, rising to 667MHz from the 533MHz FSB on the original Diamondville part, but Atom's in-order design is probably the most significant bottleneck. Increasing the CPU's FSB may make for good PR material, but it's not going to do much (if anything) in the real world.

The N280 improves significantly on N270's already excellent power consumption, with a rated TDP of 2W, down 20 percent from the N270's 2.5W. How much improvement this will make in real-world battery tests is still unknown; CPU power draw definitely accounts for a significant percentage of a netbook's power consumption, but it is far from the only factor. We'll see further improvements in this area once Intel launches an updated Atom on its 32nm process technology, but that's unlikely to occur before Intel updates the processor's platform(s) in 2010.