Santa Clara, California based chip maker, Intel, last week, officially confirmed that it has started the shipping of the Atom N280, which had been expected later this year. According to Intel, it's shipping its beloved Atom single-core processor in bulks to PC manufacturers.

On Thursday last week, the spokesperson of Intel said, "Asus is already taking preorders for the 1000HE with the N280.” According to Intel, the ASUS EeePC 1000HE is the first netbook to receive the N280 processor.

According to the reviewers, the Atom N280 offers little better speed than its predecessor N270. It offers speed improvement to only 1.66GHz from the N270's 1.6GHz. The Atom N280’s performance is marginally better that the N270.

Some of the consumers, the reviewers say, will not be able to find the performance differences between the N280 and the N270. The N280, however, increases the CPU's bus speed significantly from 533MHz to 667MHz. In power consumption, the N280 is little better that the N270; it consumes 20 percent lesser power than the N270.

The Atom N280, according to the reviewers, is not the fastest processor. The Z540, which has been available since April and runs at 1.86GHz, a faster clock speed than the N280.