Cedar Trail, the next-generation version of Intel's Atom processor, has been delayed from September 2011 to November 2011 because of graphics driver and Windows 7 certification issues, reports DigiTimes.

As we reported in April, Cedar Trail will be a 32nm chip with both the CPU and GPU on a single die, but otherwise performance and power consumption should hover right around where Atom performance has been for awhile now. The Cedar Trail GPU, which supports DirectX 10.1 and a multitude of video decoding abilities, is probably the highlight of the refresh, though you can find those features combined with better CPU performance and DirectX 11 support in AMD's Brazos APU today (albeit in a slightly higher power envelope).

The true next-generation Atom architecture won't appear until 2012, but will face heavy competition from AMD on the netbook and nettop fronts and ARM in most other devices (to say nothing of the Ultrabook specification, which aims to bring laptop-class performance to netbook-sized devices). Though Atom does have its niche, it seems to be getting smaller all the time.

Source: DigiTimes