Intel Sets Out Netbook and Nettop Plans

Author	Edward Chester
Published	4th Apr 2008

Discuss this article

Email this to a friend

TrustedReviews Newsletters

It's not all about portability, though, as Intel was also insistent there's a market for desktop PCs based on the Atom platform. These new devices would come under the name nettop and they would essentially be non-portable versions of the netbook - a notion which lead to many IDF attendees scratching their heads as to what sort of market would want such a thing, as it has none of the portability benefits of the Atom platform but all the performance downsides.

Of course, the answer is down to money. As the chips used on the Atom platform are so incredibly small a great many of them can be produced from a single silicon wafer and, because silicon is one of the largest costs associated with producing a CPU, reducing the amount of it needed to manufacture a chip means it costs less. Compared to even the cheapest Celeron alternatives, Silverthorne is still significantly cheaper to produce. So cheap are these platforms, in fact, that Intel predicts final retail products could cost as low as $200 - $250 or £100 - £150.

Other advantages of the platform are that it can be passively cooled and the motherboards can be made absolutely tiny, as you can see from the picture below. We would actually argue that the models on show were larger than needs by as they included full size back plates with a plethora of connections that probably aren't needed. However, there may have been a standard layout passed down from Intel that specified this size so blame can't be laid at the doors of the OEMs.

We had a go with a couple of the systems on show and we have to say we weren't all that impressed. Yes, they were silent and quite small but they were still considerably larger than the Mac Mini, for instance, and performance was very poor - just moving a window was too much for the graphics processor. This was largely due to the demo models all running Windows XP which is not a very efficient operating system and is why we may find nettops running the same embedded Linux installations that will be used on netbooks.

Intel did admit that they expect the market for these devices to be quite small and that netbooks will take up the majority of sales. However, it did also point out that developing countries may snap up these cheap systems. It will be interesting to see if this has been the case come next Spring IDF.