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The CPU Battle Moves On the UMPC Market

Intel, Via and AMD will send their best inexpensive soldiers on the market

Feb 29, 2008 10:19 GMT  ·  By
This kind of chips won't do the trick at the roulette, but they will surely bring much more revenue
   This kind of chips won't do the trick at the roulette, but they will surely bring much more revenue

There is no doubt that the cheap, Linux-based ultra-portable computers will get a new lease of life with the advent of Intel's Diamondville processors. Based on the Silverthorne architecture with a small die size and ultra-low power consumption, the Diamondville will get widely adopted by the upcoming UMPC creations.

According to industry sources, the Diamondville will be included in Intel's upcoming versions of Classmate PC educational sub-notebook. Micro-Star International is also reported to be working on an ultra-low, ultra-cheap laptop PC powered by the Diamondville. MSI's upcoming sub-notebook will go straight to the Eee PC's neck, the brand that made a trend out of low-cost, low performance computing systems.

Recent market analysis reports claim that the low-end market is expected to grow at a dangerous rate for the mid-range notebook builders. "Once the Eee PC happened and we saw the volumes associated with it, all of a sudden, design activity really stepped up,"said Dean McCarron, founder of Mercury Research. McCarron also claims that the Eee PC will replace is current special Intel Celeron ultralow-voltage processor with the newer Diamondville when it finally arrives on the market.

The Diamondville, however, might encounter strong rivals on the market, by the time it kicks in, such as Via's C7-M processor, for instance, that powers Everex's Cloudbook ultraportable PC. The chipset manufacturer is also working on a more efficient design based on the Isaiah architecture to replace the C7-M soon.

The new processor will be built on the 64-bit technology and will feature speeds of 400 MHz to 2 GHz with a single Megabyte of L2 cache. According to McCarron, the Isaiah derivative will arrive on the retailers' shelves in the second half of the year, just like Intel's Diamondville.

Via has quite some expertise in delivering low-cost processors, but this is a first time for Intel to release a chip that does not reflect its performance in the price tag. AMD is currently not present on the UMPC market, but it will release its low-cost products in early 2009 with its Fusion processor that comes with highly integrated components.