Intel Cedar Trail will sell at half of Atom’s price

Intel is set to announce its latest 32nm-based Cedar Trail platform for netbooks in September with prices of the platform’s CPUs to go as low as US$42-47, a drop of 30-50% compared to the price of existing Atom N4xx and N5xx series CPUs at US$64-86, according to sources from netbook players.

Facing competition from tablet PCs, most netbook vendors have turned their R&D focus to tablet PCs, while shifting their netbook sales targets to emerging markets such as Brazil and India. With Intel offering an attractive quote for its Cedar Trail platform, the sources estimated that Cedar Trail-based netbooks will have an ASP of US$199-299, allowing netbooks to have advantage in price.

The Cedar Trail platform will be separated into two categories – Cedarview-M CPUs for netbooks and Cedarview-D CPUs for nettops, both featuring dual-core designs. Intel will offer two CPUs under Cedarview-M, the Atom N2600, priced at US$42 and N2800 at US$47.

In addition to price, Cedarview-M CPUs will also see a significant drop in power consumption to allow thin and light, as well as fanless designs.

The platform is capable of supporting either MeeGo or Windows 7/8, but the ASP will vary depending on the vendors’ choice of operating system.

Despite Acer and Asustek Computer having both already turned their strategy to focus on tablet PCs, the two players internally are still confident to be able to ship at least five million netbooks in 2011.

Source: DigiTimes