City of Industry (CA) – MSI this morning confirmed that its much anticipated Wind U115 and U120 netbooks will be on display at CES. The U115 will be the first netbook that can run a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) and a solid state disk (SSD) drive side-by-side.
The U115 will be much more power-efficient than previous Wind models and hit about 12 hours of battery time with an optional 6-cell battery, MSI said. However, it is generally believed that the SSD/HDD combination (which is expected to be offered in 8 GB/ 120 GB and 16 GB / 160 GB versions) is not the sole reason for the better battery performance.
Among others, Ars Technica recently reported that the U115 will use Intel’s Atom Z530 CPU and not the Atom N270, which is common in many netbooks today. Both processors run at 1.6 GHz, integrate 512 KB of L2 cache and FSB533, but the Z530 is based on the power-optimized Silverthorne core, while the N270 uses the Diamondville core. According to Intel, the Z530 does not consume more than 2 watts, while the N270 can consume twice as much.
While Intel always promoted the Z530 as a netbook/MID processor, it costs 60% more than the N270, which is targeted at “nettops”. The high price ($70 vs. $44) convinced most netbook manufacturers to choose the N270 for their products. Of course, if MSI selected the Z530 for its U115, we would expect a much higher price tag for the system as well. Don’t count on seeing this netbook for much less than $500 in its base configuration.
In addition to the U115, MSI will also unveil the U120, which will be available with integrated WiMax or 3G connectivity. The company also announced that it will showcase its new all-in-one Wind NetOn nettop systems. The computers are based on a dual-core Diamondville processor: The Atom N330 runs at 1.60 GHz, includes twice the L2 cache of the N230 (for a total of 1 MB), the same FSB533 support and is rated at twice the thermal design power (TDP) of the N230 (8 watts versus 4 watts).
The processor is paired with Intel’s 945GC Express Chipset, which integrates the manufacturer’s 950 graphics engine. MSI said that the AE1901 nettop will not consume more than 50 watts (including a 16:9 HD display).