Popularity of Intel Atom Drops Sharply: The End of Netbooks Is Coming Closer?

It is not a secret that thanks to media tablets and inexpensive notebooks the popularity of netbooks is declining rapidly. It looks like in the third quarter the fast erosion of netbooks intensified and consequently sales of Intel Corp.'s Atom central processing units dropped to two years minimum.
In the third quarter of FY2011, Intel Atom family revenue, including microprocessors and associated chipsets, was $269 million, down 24% from the second quarter and down 32% from the third quarter of 2010. The result is well-below logical seasonal patterns and clearly indicates lowering popularity of netbooks, such as Acer Aspire One- or Asus Eee PC-series, and nettops.

 

Given the lack of major tablet design wins, sales of Atom system-on-chips cannot offset dropping shipments of microprocessors for ultra low-cost personal computers (ULCPCs). Obviously, there are still millions of notebooks and netbooks sold, but their market share is dropping and volumes are most likely lower than combined sales of popular media tablets, such as Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab.

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