Intel has unveiled the latest addition to its Atom processor family, aimed at what it sees as the emerging market for low-cost subnotebooks.
Intel has released two chips: the N270 and N230, processors designed for what Intel calls "netbooks" and "nettops" — cheap notebook alternatives that are smaller and have fewer functions than standard laptops but also lighter and use far less power.
The new chips are basically the same chips as the earlier Atom processors released for mobile internet devices, but they have been tweaked slightly for use with bigger internet access devices, said Erik Reid, director of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, on a conference call.
Asia Pacific VP and general manager Navin Shenoy, unveiling the new chip at Computex in Taiwan, said that the Atom breaks with the Intel tradition of making faster and faster chips, which have an inherently high cost.
By contrast, he said, the low-power Atom chip is relatively cheap to produce and exceptionally small, with 2,500 units — each containing 47 million transistors — fitting on one 12-inch wafer.
That's the equivalent of squeezing 11 of the devices onto one US penny.
"Intel has always been about faster, faster and faster chips," Shenoy said. "But we want to innovate in a new direction this time, very low power, very small size, and, yes, very low cost."
Intel estimates that a netbook using the Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, a 7-inch to 10-inch screen, 512MBs of RAM, and 2GBs to 4GBs of flash storage should cost around US$250. The N270 processor for netbooks costs US$44 in quantities of 1,000 units, while the N230 processor for nettops costs US$29.
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