New netbooks should be ready in Q4 2009 to Q1 2010 and Intel now confirms something that we wrote back in January, the possibility of a fanless netbook. Intel didn’t really said it will happen it just said that the new platform has “fanless potential”.

Fanless design would heavily depend on a configuration and scenario of power workload but there is a chance that some systems might come without a fan, or eventually that the fan will be there but it won’t spin much unless in extreme situations.

The new platform is significantly smaller and two chip design definitely helps a lot. The sad part is that from a performance point of view, new Atoms will be just as fast or very similar to performance of N270 platform which is not what many users expected. Intel wants to keep Atom below notebook prices and since netbooks got really popular, we can foresee the continuance in this fight of notebooks versus netbooks.