Intel's Atom not just for Netbooks anymore

Intel's mainstay Netbook chip is finding a home in desktops, underscored by recent announcements from Hewlett-Packard and Acer.
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On Wednesday, details emerged of HP's MediaSmart Server LX195, a home server packing a 1.6GHz Atom 230 processor. To date, HP has been using a Sempron processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

Asus was one of the first to bring out a head-swiveling Atom-based desktop--the Eee Box, which has been updated recently with ATI graphics.

Earlier this month, Acer rolled out the Acer AspireRevo, a small, slick box that augments the Atom with an Nvidia Ion chipset to boost graphics performance.

By design, Atom is a more power-frugal and, as a result, a slower processor than Intel's mainstream Core 2 chip architecture. But it's cheap--the Atom 230 is $29, whereas comparative Celeron chips are about $34 but draw much more power. And mainstream Core 2 Duo desktop processors start at about $110.

Intel has long maintained that Atom has a place in so-called Nettops and, last year, brought out the dual-core Atom 330 specifically for this market.

This strategy was validated this week in Taipei, where motherboard maker ASRock was showing a desktop with a dual-core Atom 330 processor and an Nvidia Ion chipset. Asus is also expected to update the Eee Box line with a dual-core Atom processor.

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BY Brooke Crothers
Source：cnet

Brooke Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET News.com, and has been an editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street Journal. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current employee of CNET. Contact him at mbcrothers@gmail.com. Disclosure.

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