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Intel's Atom to bring in new era of low-cost laptops
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 03 June 2008, 23:54 IST
Chennai: Low-cost laptops will see a further dip in their price. Intel's Atom, a low-power processor designed for products such as 'Netbook' (smaller laptop), will facilitate a price reduction of low cost Internet devices by around Rs 2,000 ($50), creating a new set of PC users, including school children, says an Intel official.
According to R. Ravichandran, Director, Sales (South Asia), Intel Technology India, a Netbook using Atom consumes 2.5 watts power compared to 25 watts by a laptop. Moreover, the Atom will shrink the space for transistors.
The Atom is 45 nanometer (nm) in size. One can fit two- thousand 45-nm transistor gates across the width of a human hair.
Netbook offers an easy-to-use mobile device with simple interface. With wireless connectivity, it offers options for education, photo and video viewing, social networking, voice over Internet protocol, email, messaging, browsing and other Internet activities, and for basic applications like Word.
Atom is Intel's smallest processor built with the world's smallest transistors. With personal computing increasingly going mobile and the computer industry developing new classes of products to connect next billion people to the Internet, the Atom offer customers the ability to innovate around the low-power design, he said.
The demand for a new category of low-cost Internet-centric mobile computing dubbed 'Netbooks' and basic Internet-centric desktop PCs dubbed 'Nettops' will grow substantially over the next several years. Some of the emerging sectors in India for these devices include education (for children from 3-8 standards), healthcare and manufacturing, Ravichandran said.
