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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Related Articles;

• Intel briefly shows off an Atom SoC powered smartphone

• Intel's Silvermont: A New Atom Architecture

• Intel’s 2011 Investor Meeting - Intel’s Architecture Group: 14nm Airmont Atom In 2014

 

AMDs Radeon 6800 and 6900 Series graphics cards get price drops

AMD finalized its recalibrated product pricing of Radeon HD 6800 and Radeon HD 6900 series products in the wake of NVIDIA's launch of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti later today. NVIDIA's new GPU is expected to revive the green giant's competitiveness at a key sub-$300 price-point, which could destabilize AMD's SKUs in the price-proximity. Without many options left, AMD is setting the following new prices (prices in EUR and USD):

• Radeon HD 6870 1 GB: 189.99€, $219
  Radeon HD 6950 1 GB: 225.00€, $259
  Radeon HD 6950 2 GB: 239.99€, $269~289

The prices should be in effect very soon. Prices apart, AMD will also release a new driver that will bring about considerable performance improvements to all Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs.

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