"Atom to be 62% Cheap..."

So, are you saying the Atom will become 62% cheapER? Or that the processor itself is simply 62% cheap, and 38% quality?

Or that the Atom will make up 62% of cheap PC sales by Q4 2009?

Good Lord that's a long sentence. But I presume from that sentence that you intended to mean the Intel Atom CPU would make up 62% of cheap PC sales by Q4 of 2009.

Interesting news I suppose. Just means folks with "cheap PCs" will have even less gaming ability than they have now with their Pentium & Celeron chips. Talk about "Internet/Email Only" PCs...

Just saw this on Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/17/asus-eeebox-pc-b208-with-dual-core-atom-and-hd-4350-graphics-un/):
"ASUS EeeBox PC B208 with dual-core Atom and HD 4350 graphics un-announced... The B208 trumps ASUS' B206 by slapping a dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor into the slim, monitor-riding slab as well as 256MB of ATI Radeon Hd 4350 graphics. ".

Intel Dual core Atom + ATI HD4350... very interesting combination, isn't it?

Wouldn't a better title would be "Report: Atom to take 62% of budget marketshare by Q4 '09"?

The Atom makes sense for the netbook market, but I really doubt it will become so popular in the desktop segment. How much cheaper is the Atom 330 than a Celeron chip? $10? I think Dell, HP and others will end up with a customer service nightmare if they start pushing these processors on the desktop.

Yeah, or even just tossing an "of" between the "62%" and "Cheap".

Good point.
I am wondering is there other combination which can make an equally cool (low power, low nose), small in size, ok proformance, and still cheap nettop beside using Atom?

By the way, how fast a Celeron is compairing w/ Atom 330? What are their power requirement different?

Small, stylish, power efficient PCs that everyone can afford and that are fast enough for what 95% of users need? Sounds good to me.
Don't worry, there will still be $999 "Extreme" CPUs and $599 "Ultra GTX GTS+ HD X5999" videocards for those who want them. Indeed, if the PC itself, as an appliance, gets cheaper thanks to "nettops", chances are this will also deflate the prices of high-end parts somewhat. It will be harder to ask for $2900 for a system when that $225 nettop is good enough for most users.

Why have thin clients not really caught on?

Meh. This news makes no difference to most users of this site anyway - we won't settle for a weak computer for a main system.

I have to wonder why Intel is still offering the Celeron though. It's significantly weaker than even Pentium Dual-Core, consumes too much power to be in a tiny system, and costs more than Atom. I don't see the rationale for keeping the Celeron.

Which means that when AMD Yukon comes out, they will eventually follow suit with a low-cost desktop that stomps atom into the ground in every category. The "full computing experience" is kind of expected on a desktop, netbooks are a different story.

I wonder how large these 'cheap' PCs are? Do they follow the regular form factor of the Atom, or are they a large form factor? It seems like you could get a Disc drive and a hard drive with an ION setup in something pretty small.

Do you really want to pay a fee for how much computing you do? Not to mention the infrastructure isn't really there yet for anything High-res. If your internet went down, you'd be out of luck.

I wish I would have waited for dual core atoms before I bought my aspire one

But an atom in a desktop sounds pretty stupid considering the average person now has a core 2 duo in the 2Ghz+ range. maybe if they made a 3Ghz dual core atom that was very close to the same, if not the same or better, than a C2D clock for clock but still lower in voltage and cheaper to produce. But then again I recall an article a while back proving that when it came to faster speeds a C2D would be more energy efficient at the current speeds they are at than an atom if one would be made at the speeds of a C2D. Theoretically anyway, and what is on paper isn't always fact *cough* Phenom *cough*

It's sad to see that here at Tom's Hardware the comments are often much better written than the articles ...
And I thought Betanews' writers were bad .... I take that back Scott M. Fulton et al

Tom's might be picking up on that:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/t [...] ,7302.html

I know! I was indeed surprised when I read that immediately after this article. I felt as if they had read my mind

If I wanted a slow CPU, I may as well pick up an older Athlon X2 or pentium dual core for like $40. Seriously, I could have sworn that for netbooks, the old Celeron running at 900 mhz is a little faster than this Atom at 1.6 ghz, anyone else see the same? With regards to possilby power consumption, why is this Atom so "great" architecturally?

I'd love to see an AtomDC processor paired with a Radeon 4660!
The two speak of powersaving and performance on a budget!

As far as the atom 270,it wouldn't surprise me if the article read:
"Atom to be 62% CheapER";
Since the release of Win7 soon the Atom 270 will not have the juice to run that effectively; leaving Win 7 desktops to either run an Atom DC,or the newer Atom with graphic chip and/or memory controller on chip/die.

I only pitty Via, who might release too late the via chip + nano platform, which might be barely enough for Win7 (unless it supports HT or is a dual core version).

I've always said, what we need is a 2 core PC, one powerful and BIG core, and one small core; the smaller mainly to run Windows and background tasks, and the bigger to run the applications.

Because it outperforms the Celeron by MUCHfor dual threaded applications, whileconsuming about half the power, and due to it's HT structure. It not only boots up windows much faster, Windows itselfis also much more responsive. Not to mention, if you compare it to the Celeron 800Mhz used in the EeePc to a Celeron 1,2Ghz you benefit of the Atom's increased FSB as well as memory speed.
Also the Atom has a 64bit capable structure (or something), to run 64 bit Operating systems (which many wonder why the need for that).
It also has more sleep states,and quickly enters into a sleep state disabling unused parts of the processor as soon as they are not used.
Unlike a ~2004 celeron processor which basically always is active if not put to sleep by Windows power scheme. This would result in even greater power savings!

And I'm sure there are more benefits to it (like the fact that the Atom's die is about 1/4th the size of a celeron one; the chip + 'socket'= about 2,5 times smaller)... etc etc..

Nice title TH. It's so terrible I'm not even going to bother to read the article out of fear it'll be detrimental to my own grammar skills.

Race to the bottom!

Folks, the Atom processor isn't intended to be placed in gamer boxes or desktops because it is much slower than the Core 2 or AMD64 processors. Its true role is to power low cost laptops and special purpose systems like HTPC, NAS, firewalls, etc. which do not have significant ratio of number-crunching floating point ops.

They have a low-power requirement which should allow for huge improvement in battery times for mobile units. They are faster than equivalent speed Celeron chips as well, tho I haven't benchmarked the two yet. My Toshiba Satellite has the 1.6 GHz Celeron and my new HTPC box has the Intel D945GCLF2 dual-core Atom 330 CPU running at 1.6 GHz onboard.

The Atom CPU runs cool (40C) and the processor has only a heatsink, while the NB chip has a H/S with a fan. I have installed MythDora (Fedora 10 plus MythTV 0.21) onto a 4GB SSD (266MHz CF + Syba SATA2CF adapter). The memory is a 2GB Crucial DDR2 667Mhz stick. Add a DVDROM, an Edimax USB wifi dongle and a case w/270W P/S and I have a box costing about $240. I can send video (LiveTV or pre-recorded) from the MythTV backend box, across wireless to this frontend box and play it on a VGA monitor just fine Eventually, the frontend Atom box will sit under/behind the TV in the den and run cool and quiet.

The only problem I have, is the S-Video output does not work. Not with the current Intel video driver in the latest MythDora 10.21. And, my old JVC TV has only S-Video input. But, I have heard Intel has a fix for S-Video o/p which will be available to the field "RSN". But, if I break down and buy a new LCD TV, then S-Video will not be an issue as most new LCD TVs have the VGA PC input plug (and HDMI, and DVI, and composite).

I do not know if this 945G graphics chipset will power 1080p HD or not. That may become a problem if it doesn't.

it doesn't!