Intel intros thin notebook styles

Sean Maloney, executive VP of Intel’s sales and marketing group told an audience at the Computex show in Old Taipei that a family of ultra low voltage notebook chips would create a new category of notebooks.

He also showed off the Atom “Pine Trail”, the next generation of microprocessors for netbooks.

The Intel ultra low voltage notebooks will measure less than an inch thick, weigh under three pounds and include support for both wi-fi and for WiMAX.

The starting price for ultra thin notebooks will be around $500, meaning that essentially such machines will occupy a space between netbooks and higher priced fully fledged notebooks.

The category is a new SKU (stock keeping unit) for Intel, designed for the mainstream consumer market. There’s a slot for second or third computers in the home, Maloney believes.

The 32 nanometer chip for desktops are codenamed Clarkdale and Arrandale, while the Lynnfield CPU, available towards the end of this year, will give 40 percent better performance than Penryn, he claimed.