Intel has announced an incremental upgrade to the popular Atom platform that improves core clockspeed, memory bandwidth and media playback.

The Atom processor has received the slightest upgrade in the form of a 60MHz upgrade from 1.6GHz (Atom N270) to 1.66GHz (Atom N280). More substantially, memory support has improved from DDR2-533 to DDR2-667. But without a doubt the platform’s biggest update comes in the form of the new GN40 chipset.

Intel is promising that the new GN40 chipset will permit users to smoothly play 720P content. We imagine that this is in response to NVIDIA’s Ion platform which already arrives with 1080P support.

The netbook war wages on!