Intel answers AMD Neo with 'ultrathin' laptop chip
Agent Smith, anyone?
Intel is reportedly cooking up a mobile processor designed for a new category of mobile platforms that is quite similar to what AMD announced just last week.
From the Consumer Electronics Show, Cnet reports that Chipzilla will release a new Core-architecture processor for laptops that fits somewhere between low-end netbooks and high-priced ultraportable laptops — an ultranetportabook, if you will.
The chip, which will debut later this year, is said to cost more than Intel's low-cost Atoms, while falling below that of Intel's ULV (ultra-low voltage) Core 2 Duo chips. Intel apparently wasn't willing to give much more detail on the scheme other than that it's headed for for notebooks "that are less than one inch (25mm)" and the chip itself will be 22- by 22-mm.
The upshot is that users get a reasonable thin and low-cost laptop that still has some decent multimedia capabilities.
Intel's plans sound rather identical to AMD's new Athlon Neo processor which is based on the Yukon platform. The first machine to put Neo into practice is HP's Pavillion dv2, which starts at about $700.
With both AMD and Intel in the game, clearly the chipmakers believe this laptop niche-within-a-niche can become a fully fledged and profitable cranny. We'll just have to wait until more machines roll out in the space before it's clear if moderately-small, medium-cost laptops are the next big thing. ®
COMMENTS
Portable niche morphology - anyone for cheap & nasty throwaways?
The main criteria affecting portable price used to be size and performance, but both are good enough now. The main purpose of these cheap CPUs is to justify a higher price for standard multi-core ones.
Size doesn't really affect cost, as all screens from postcard to office folder have similar pricing. So vanity portables are going the way of gold-plated iPods and Swarovski-studded accordions. Your idea of stamp-sized "notebooks 'that are less than one inch' " is unlikely to catch on - plug in a touch-screen mp4 player, a keyboard, a fuel cell and a DVD-drive perhaps?
The performance is related to CPU speed, but now all CPUs are fast enough to manage portable office use, unless they are stuffed with a multi-megabyte OS. Perhaps we should be paying a premium for a sleek OS running in a small cache.
The medium-priced, medium performance call reeks of compromise and deserves to succeed.
@Adam...
"but I want the moon on a stick for £12.99".....
Tried eBay...sure someone in Nigeria has one kicking around....
@Christopher
That would be the OQO then.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/08/ces_oqo_goes_atom/
Probably a bit more than you want to pay but I want the moon on a stick for £12.99.
Everythings good except...
I've been seriously considering buying a netbook, but the are just so expensive for the Features you get, I know they're meant for web / e-mail, but I've had a PDA that can do that for year, and at half the cost when it was new, hopefully Intel and AMD can work to make a CHEAP netbook, that's where the money really is. Although what I'd really like to see would be a bigger-than-a-smart-phone-smaller-than-a-laptop tablet, something about 7-8" that can run XP / Windows 7 respectably, which might be doable with current chips.
