Intel launches new Atom for netbooks

In today's podcast: Intel launches new Atom for netbooks; Red Hat will not support Itanium in Enterprise Linux 6; and Google loses book search case in Paris.

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Intel has launched its next-generation Atom netbook processor, saying it will bring longer battery life and improved system performance to low-cost laptops. The single-core Atom N450 chip is 60 percent smaller than existing Atom processors, and consumes about 5.5 watts, 20 percent less than previous models. Netbooks with N450 chips will be shown by major vendors at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The chip integrates graphics and memory controller into the CPU, making it capable of playing 720p high-definition graphics natively. Intel also launched two processors for low-cost, small form factor desktops, the D410 and the dual-core D510.

Red Hat is dropping support for a different family of Intel processors in the next version of its Linux distribution for businesses. Enterprise Linux 6 will no longer run on Itanium processors used in some high-end servers. However, the company will continue to support the current version of Enterprise Linux on Itanium processors until March 2014, and some Itanium server vendors may also support Red Hat Linux for three years after that.

Mozilla on Thursday issued a fifth beta of Firefox 3.6 rather than move on to a release candidate, a decision that will push the final code ship date into early 2010. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 was released as an update to current testers early Thursday, and can also be installed by others who download it from Mozilla's site.
Beta 5 includes nearly 130 fixes compared to the last beta, which Mozilla released in late November. As recently as September, Mozilla was planning to deliver the final of Firefox 3.6 by early November. Subsequently, Mozilla began using a by-year's-end window to describe its release plans for Firefox 3.6.

Google's book search project suffered a legal setback in Paris on Friday, as a court ordered it to pay 300 thousand euros in damages for breach of copyright, and to stop distributing digital copies of French books to French Internet users without the permission of their publishers. For each day that the books remain accessible online without permission, Google must pay a further 10 thousand euros, the court ruled. French publisher La Martinière Groupe filed suit against Google in June 2006, and was later joined in its case by the French Publishers Association. Google plans to appeal the ruling.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.