The maker of chips and bits, Intel has warned of the dangers of Netbooks eating PCs. Christian Morales (no really), Intel's European sales chief has been talking about the “cannibalisation” of the PC market by smaller, and apparently hungry, netbooks.

He said that so far the pesky netbooks had eaten their way through about 20 per cent of European PC sales without even stopping for a dessert. Morale's said that Netbook sales were about 16 percent of all notebook sales globally, and a little higher in Western Europe.

In Britain and Italy they may account for as much as a quarter of all notebook sales, he said. However in those countries the reason might be that big telcos have been giving away netbooks with their DSL packages and many of the netbooks might simply be sales that would never have happened.

So what will stop this march of netbooks and their tendency to stick PCs in a pot and cook them? Morales thinks that  later this year when the "affordable" ultra-thin laptop category takes off,  they will start to eat the cannibals.

Intel's marketing chief, Sean Maloney, said that cannibalisation tends to affect low-end laptops based on Celeron processors so Atom's apparently eating Celeron. Intel is quite fine with this, as Atom needs the fibre apparently.