IF YOU‘VE SET your mind on one of the new dual core mobile Atom netbooks that Acer has been teasing us with, well, then you might have to wait a little while longer as it seems like both Acer and Asus have decided to delay its dual core moble Atom netbooks until sometime towards the middle of August. Part of the reason behind this is meant to be stock clearing of netbooks with single core Atom processors.
The Atom N550 CPU is said to be some $11-22 more expensive than the single core Atom N455/475 according to figures quoted by Digitimes. This most likely means an end user premium of about $50, even in this tight margin market space. We very much doubt that single core netbooks will be phased out entirely, but sensible buyers would opt for dual core models, budget permitting.
Much more interesting is the fact that Digitimes is insinuating that Intel is getting ready to kill off its long running Celeron brand of budget processors in favour for Atom. The reason behind this is said to be the fact that Atom and Celeron powered devices are priced too closely and that the performance of the upcoming Atom N550 should be similar to that of entry level Celeron processors.
Judging by the fact that Intel’s good old Pentium brand has been demoted to entry level dual core processors, it’s not hard to see Intel dropping the Celeron brand as it has something of a stigma associated with it that makes users think of poor performance. Atom is also Intel’s relatively new baby and it’s being put into a wide range of low power devices, of which the most important one might be the next generation solution which is set to go into the first x86 based smartphones.
Make what you want from this, but it seems like Intel is getting ready to change its mobile CPU segmentation yet again. However, dropping a brand in favour for a more popular one could also be seen as a marketing ploy, as most Celeron processors today bar the most entry level models are actually dual core processors and don’t perform much worse than their Pentium siblings. However, it’s better to retain a good brand name than a bad one, so one does what one has to do.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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