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New low-cost notebook platform from Intel

by on15 January 2008
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Better than the EeePC

Intel is working with a range of partners to ready new low-cost notebooks for a Q3 introduction this year, and the new platform is known as Shelton. What we're looking at here is Intel's upcoming Diamondville CPU, which looks like it will be clocket at 1.6GHz on a 533MHz FSB.

Add to this the Intel 945GSE chipset with integrated graphics and support for single channel DDR2 memory and you have the basics. The power consumption of the CPU is meant to be a mere 3.5W and the whole platform will only draw 8W.

Although this doesn't account for additional hardware, of course, this is just for the chipset and CPU. Other hardware that will be supported includes an 802.11g WiFi module from Intel and the use of either a USB or IDE SSD drive, although we'd expect these SSD drives to be similar to those used in the EeePC, e.g., quite small in size.

Hopefully, we'll see slightly larger models than the EeePC, but as cost is key, don't expect to see anything spectacularly different. According to Digitimes, MSI and Gigabyte are some of the first adopters developing products on the new platform with Dell, HP and Acer expected to follow suit.

With an expected retail price of between US$300-$500, this could prove to be a very interesting platform, although by now you should know how accurate these kind of expected prices are. Let's just hope for some slightly more usable models than the EeePC for people with "fat" fingers .

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Last modified on 16 January 2008
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