Intel: laptop/desktop crossover coming sooner than expected
Small, Cheap Computers™ driving demand
Intel will sell more mobile CPUs than desktop processors this year, the chip giant's CEO claimed this week.
"The crossover from the desktop to the notebook [is] happening essentially a year sooner than we first had thought," said Paul Otellini at Intel's earnings conference.
It's not that long ago that Intel and others were looking out to 2010 for the point at which more laptops are sold than desktops, a state towards which the computer market has been clearly heading for the best part of a decade.
More recently, Intel forecast the crossover point would come in 2009.
Otellini stressed Intel is ready to take advantage of the shift, pitching his company's line of Centrino-brand chippery for laptops and its newly launched Atom family for handheld internet access devices and Small, Cheap Computers™ like the Asus Eee PC.
Indeed, Intel CFO Stacy Smith highlighted SCCs as one of the drivers behind accelerated demand for laptops.
"We are going to start to see the impact of that in the second quarter," he said. "It does look to be driving some incremental unit growth beyond what I thought when I first set my forecast for the year."
COMMENTS
Blame the Desktop OEMs...
...For making cheap, shoddy desktop PC's.
People then see the laptops with similar performance, at a similar price point, and think as per the Cynical ACs post above.
Mine's the one with the Q6600 in the pocket...
Snag
The only drawback is that they're so easy to steal. I can see them being banned in Government circles if they lose many more...
@@I don't buy it
He may be a bitter, cynical sod, but he makes a fair point though. I've a PC at home, and one on my desk. My work uses thin clients connected to a central farm pushing out a published desktop via citrix
What do I need a laptop for? To work on the train home for 20 minutes? My data is centralled stored, managed and backed up, so I'd just be introducing an unneccessary risk factor if I was dragging around a laptop with local copies of data. Give me a blackberry (or do I just grab a 3G iPhone, for it's web browsing?) and I can completely forgo the need for a further processing device- I'll just navigate to the citrix access gateway if I need to review a document.
I'll still buy one of those nice new HP 2133 devices though, just in case, like....
Not so power hungry
I think the reason for the convergence is that a couple of years ago we finally invented computers that were powerful enough to do 99% of everything the average person wants. Unless you're into the latest FPS games, there hasn't been a good reason to upgrade your PC past around 1.6 - 2 GhZ. Laptops now happily do everything our desktops do other than gaming, and gaming is nor pretty firmly in the living room attached to our HDTVs.
The next revolution for laptops though, especially to capture a little of the gaming market, would be to design and externally accessible peripheral port, fast enough for mobile graphics cards. so that One could simply buy a faster card, and slot it in place of the old one, no opening up of laptop required.
Also a few more standardisations wouldn't hurt, laptops are still just a pain in the ass to upgrade even these days.
Embedded != x86
Relatively few embedded applications use x86. Most use ARM (for 32 bits).
