Intel's Classmate PC Goes on Sale in India
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Intel's rugged, low-cost laptop is now available to to consumers and businesses in India.
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The Classmate PC will be sold only to schools and not through retail channels to consumers.
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(InfoWorld) - IntelÂ launched a dual-core notebook chip for high-end users on Monday, continuing an effort toÂ defend its shareÂ of the fast-growing notebook PC market against Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD). Intel is selling the new Core 2 Extreme X7800 processor to PC vendors now, and says it will reach store shelves within two weeks, boosting performance for the hard-core gamers and digital artists who now use notebooks powered by Intel's Core Duo T2600. The company encouraged vendors to push even faster performance by opening the chip's speed protection locks, allowing them to overclock the processor for even faster operation. Some video game fans seek top performance by running chips beyond their rated speed limits on desktop PCsÂ such asÂ Dell's XPS 720 series. The practice is less common on notebook PCs, which are usually optimized for the best battery endurance. By concentrating on notebooks, Intel is aiming at the sweet spot of the PC market. Vendors have seen sparse growth in desktop PC shipments in recent years, increasing by only single-digit percentages in 2005, 2006, and forecasts for 2007. But demand for notebooks in soaring, with global notebook shipments showing increases of 35.9 percent in 2005, 28.4 percent in 2006, and an estimated 25.3 percent in 2007, according to the analyst firm iSuppli. In May, Intel made another effort to push sales of its mobile chips byÂ launching its Santa Rosa bundleÂ of mobile processors and chipsets, an upgrade to its popular Centrino platform.Â AMD quickly respondedÂ by announcing later that month that it would use a new mobile processor called "Griffin" as the basis of a collection of processors and chip sets code-named Puma, expected to reach markets in the middle of 2008. Intel now hopes to regain the initiative by expanding its Core 2 Extreme brand from high-end desktops to high-end notebooks. It is selling the 2.6GHz Core 2 Extreme X7800 notebook chip for $851. Also on Monday, Intel announced five new desktop chips, led by the quad-core, 3.0GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850, intended for game developers, and the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700. Intel is selling those two chips for $999 and $530, respectively, priced in 1,000-unit quantities. Intel's new dual-core chips are all in the Core 2 Duo family, including the 3.0GHz E6850, for $266; the 2.66GHz E6750, for $183; and the 2.33GHz E6550, for $163. The company is shipping all the chips now, and expects vendors to bring them to markets in two weeks.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel Corp. wants to see its low-cost Classmate PC help transform they way students in developing countries are educated. And the company is not alone. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project also hopes its low-cost XO laptop can close the "digital divide" that exists between the developed world and emerging markets. Much has been made of these two efforts, which are often painted as rivals by the media and observers. Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel's sales and marketing group, recently spoke with IDG News Service about the Classmate PC and the challenges Intel hopes to address with the device. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview. IDG News Service: Is there room for both the Classmate PC and OLPC as efforts to close the digital divide in emerging markets? Sean Maloney: I've spent a good deal of my life traveling around emerging markets and the first thing I want to say is that it's a truly humongous problem. It's an enormous, enormous problem you're talking about. No one company is going to solve this, whether it's us or the OLPC guys, or Asustek, or HP. And no one single approach is going to tackle the issue either. It's very diverse what people want. Even if you pick one country, say India, you're not going to get the state governments having the same opinions on how this should be handled. It's a perfect problem that a Taiwanese economy of scale could tackle. What Taiwan has always done in the past -- with stunning success -- is drive down costs for standardization and mass manufacturing. IDGNS: And standardization helps keep costs low... Maloney: Yeah, if they're standardized it makes field repair easier and logistics easier and distribution chains easier and all that stuff. It's not just about the device. It's also about the education software that goes on it, the role of the teacher in the class, and then someone has to maintain the thing locally. Many of these countries actually want to assemble it and someone has to do the integration, and all of that. It's a broader issue than just the device, regardless of whether it's an Asustek device, or a Classmate PC, or an OLPC. IDGNS: Apart from education, will these low-cost computers help to increase PC penetration in developing countries? Maloney: To be determined. I've spent a lot of time in the last year in emerging markets and the striking thing is how many mid-range and high-end notebooks are being sold. If you go to Egypt or Turkey or Ukraine or Poland or Czech Republic or Brazil or Argentina, you're seeing shopping malls everywhere converting over to selling notebooks. You could see it in China a year ago, where you go into shopping malls that used to sell desktops and now they're full of notebooks. You see the same thing all across India. It is amazing how many mainstream, made in Taiwan or made in China, notebooks are sold in emerging markets. People have the same aspirations and brand aspirations. You can't patronize people and say we get the big one with the 14-inch color screen and you get the little one, that's not going to work. My view is that these things, like Classmate PC, are much better targeted at kids, with a much smaller screen, smaller keyboard. IDGNS: Is the aim to give the students in developing countries basic PC skills, or is computer access the key to something larger? Maloney: It's about the Web more than anything. I have young kids and it's almost obscene: my kids have access to it and there are 2 billion kids that don't. The disadvantage for someone who doesn't have access to the Web is overwhelming. Â
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In an unexpected development, chip giant Intel Corp. has joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The nonprofit project aims to equip children in developing countries with specially designed low-cost notebooks powered by chips from Intel&#39;s rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).
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One for you, one for them The group behind the third-world oriented $100 (ish) laptop will also offer consumers in developed countries the chance to buy its machine later this year.â¦
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The PC maker continues its expansion of retail outlets around the world.
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(InfoWorld) - Global PC sales have slowed a tad over the past few weeks as the market waits for Intel to announce new price reductions, market researchers said. The world's largest chip maker is widely expected to publish a new price list on July 22 that shows lower prices for microprocessors aimed at the desktop PC market. The company regularly updates its pricing, but doesn't disclose when or how much prices will change, an Intel spokesman said Thursday. Still, PC makers in Taiwan, as well as analysts and market researchers said they receive word of price changes ahead of time, and that the expected Intel price reductions were the reason Advanced Micro DevicesÂ announced microprocessor price cuts earlier this month. AMD slashed prices on its top-of-the-line desktop PC microprocessors by a few hundred dollars, and now offers six AMD Athlon dual-core microprocessors for below $100 each. The AMD move was aimed atÂ pre-empting Intel's anticipated July reductions, according to a report by investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group. The expected price cuts are a continuation of Intel's battle for market share against rival AMD. It's a fight that has been great for users, particularly in desktop PCs. Microprocessors are among the most expensive parts in a PC, so price cuts on the chips usually lead to better deals for users, either on lower PC prices or more add-ons, such as better DVD drives, more memory, or larger hard disks. The market share battles have also prompted both Intel and AMD to boost technology, resulting in more bang for a user's buck. The price war hasn't been so good for the companies. Intel's stock fell 4.8 percent to end at $25.06 per share on the NASDAQ stock exchange Wednesday, a day afterÂ the company reportedÂ a lower than expected profit margin for the second quarter. Analysts blamed the price war. The fight with Intel has caused AMD to report weaker earnings in recent quarters, and analysts are not optimistic about its second quarter earnings, which it will report later Thursday in the U.S. "We believe the worse than expected gross margin, higher than expected R&D [research and development] spending and low quality earnings leverage (tax rate changes, sold depreciation, etc.) will cast a shadow over [Intel's] stock," wrote Michael Masdea, chip analyst at Credit Suisse Securities (USA), in a recent report. He predicted that Intel gained market share on AMD in the second quarter, based onÂ its earnings report. Market researchers were not able to say exactly how muchÂ the PC marketÂ has slowed over the past few weeks, but indicated that the weaker sales have shown up in various places in the PC component supply chain. Slower trading in the DRAM (dynamic RAM) market, for example, caused prices to drop last week, according to DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online DRAM trading site. The company blamed the anticipated Intel price adjustments for the declines. Â
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Asustek and Intel are developing a line of notebook PCs priced as low as $199, for emerging and education markets.
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Bit by bits Fanboys everywhere can now buy Intel by the bit.â¦
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Asustek Computer&#39;s Linux-based Eee PC laptop will soon be on sale in North America and Europe, and the company plans to offer a version running Windows XP by the end of the year.The Eee PC is a&#160;low-cost laptop&#160;designed primarily for children and emerging markets such as India. It weighs less than a kilogram, has a 7-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen and can connect to the Internet wirelessly. The&#160;first version went on sale earlier this month&#160;in Asia, including in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it&#39;s priced at about NT$11,100 (US$340)On Nov. 1 the Eee PC will go on sale at stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Toronto, and also through e-commerce Web sites in North America, Asustek officials said Tuesday. It will then be rolled out gradually in Europe, starting in Germany on Nov. 9. Major Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, will follow in mid-November.The first Eee PCs run a Linux operating system from Xandros. By the end of the year, Asustek will also offer versions running Microsoft&#39;s Windows XP.Pricing for the laptops in Europe and North America hasn&#39;t been announced. In Taiwan, the price difference between the XP and Linux versions will be about NT$1,000, Asustek said in a statement.Asustek has shipped about 100,000 Eee PCs so far, and by the end of the year it&#39;s targeting 400,000, said Jerry Shen, Asustek&#39;s president, at an investor conference Tuesday in Taiwan. Next year it expects to ship 3.8 million of the laptops.&quot;We&#39;re in talks with a few governments and we have already confirmed orders for 1 million units next year,&quot; said Sunny Han, global marketing director.Asustek reaffirmed its commitment to push the price of the Linux-based Eee PC down to US$199, nearly the same price as the XO laptop developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. OLPC is pricing the laptops at $200, according to its Givemany and Laptopgiving donor programs.One of the biggest costs for the Eee PC is taxes, Shen said. VAT (value added tax) and other taxes have a big impact on price. Governments interested in buying Eee PCs for education could get a better price by waiving such taxes, he said. An Eee PC sold to a government without taxes factored in would cost around $199, while the price increases to about $300 with taxes.The configuration of the laptops also affects the price, with the amount of flash memory and DRAM (dynamic RAM), the camera and battery having the biggest influence, he said. The price of the kind of flash memory Asustek is using for data storage in the Eee PCs has gone up recently.Earlier this month, Asustek announced four Eee PC laptop configurations it planned to sell in stores and online, all running Linux software.The least expensive was the &quot;Surf&quot; with a 2GB flash memory drive and 256MB of DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM, to retail for NT$7,999 when it comes out around the end of November. Another version of the Surf included a 4GB flash drive and 512MB of DDR2 DRAM, and will cost NT$9,999 when it comes out in mid-November. Both laptops have an Intel microprocessor.Two higher-priced Eee PCs were also launched. The NT$11,100 version included a built-in camera and speakers, and can carry out simple voice commands such as &quot;computer, access the Internet,&quot; or &quot;computer, make a phone call.&quot; It contains a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 512MB of DDR2 DRAM and a 4GB flash drive. The other laptop, at NT$13,888 and due out at the end of November, carries an 8GB flash drive and 1GB of DDR2 DRAM in addition to features similar to the NT$11,100 version.At the launch ceremony, Asustek also showed off one Eee PC running Microsoft Windows XP Professional, version 2002, Service Pack 2. The hardware on board was the same as for the NT$11,100 Linux-based Eee PC. The Windows XP-Eee PC included Office 2003 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
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(InfoWorld) - About half of the work on Intel's recently announced "teraflop research chip" was done in India, highlighting the country's growing importance to Intel's research and development efforts. Researchers in Oregon and Bangalore designed the programmable chip, which crams 80 cores onto a fingernail-size device that draws just 62 watts of power, said Vasantha Erraguntla, engineering manager at the India Research Center. Erraguntla led the 20-person design team in Bangalore that worked on the logic, circuit and physical design of the chip. Intel first discussed the research processor earlier this month, saying it can perform more than a trillion floating point operations per second, or a teraflop. It doesn't plan to bring that particular device to market, but the researchers in Bangalore are now looking at the implications of putting such a powerful processor into a system. The chip has spurred research projects in the areas of cooling, high-bandwidth interconnects and power management, said Vittal Kini, director of the research center, which was set up in 2004 and is the latest addition to the India Development Center in Bangalore. Besides working on the teraflop chip, some 50 researchers there are working on other areas of circuit and systems research. The Development Center is fast emerging as a key research and design location for Intel. The company has about 3,000 staff in India, of which close to 2,900 are in research and development. Indian engineers work on the design of chips and chipsets, reference designs, system software, and packaging technologies, said Sandeep Shah director of the mobility group at the India Development Center. Indian engineers have full ownership of the development of key Intel chips for the server and mobile market, he added.
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InfoWorld - Intel's Classmate PC isn't just for students anymore. HCL Infosystems plans to sell a version of the Classmate PC to consumers and businesses in India who want a rugged, low-cost laptop.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel has teamed up with a Taiwanese motherboard vendor to tap China'sÂ burgeoning Internet cafe market, on the heels of a similar announcement earlier this year by rival Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD). Intel China and Elitegroup Computer Systems are taking the battle to system administrators at Chinese Internet cafes, offering the latest version of Intel's network management software designed for Net cafes, as well as motherboards with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo chips on board. The chip maker's Intel Platform Administrator software, IPAT 3.0 with support for Core 2 Duo, was designed to create a more secure, stable network at Internet cafes, with extras such as game management. The software is the first product developed by researchers at an Intel lab in China, designed for Chinese users, the company said in a statement. Elitegroup will provide the motherboards. The announcement follows a deal between Advanced Micro Devices (China) Co. and China's third largest computer vendor, Tsinghua Tongfang, earlier this year. In April, theÂ two companies shook handsÂ on a pact to sell PCs based on AMD chips to Internet cafes throughout China. There are over 120,000Â Internet cafes in China, requiring around 6 million PCs, according to Elitegroup. Although the market may not seem huge, nearly a third of China's 123 million Internet users log on via Net cafes at least part of the time, according to official number cruncher, the China Internet Network Information Center. Intel and Elitegroup will host a series of meetings in cities throughout China to demonstrate and sell the new products, starting with Wuhan, on Sept. 15, they said. They also plan to work with Net cafe owners to help them find ways to use the products to cut costs and improve their business.
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Intel, the world&#39;s biggest semiconductor maker, said it is helping Chinese and Indian customers build personal computers that use the Linux operating system, an alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Windows software.
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(InfoWorld) - Asustek Computer'sÂ $199 Eee PCÂ is turning out to be one of the stars at Computex 2007, grabbing attention for its small size and even smaller price. Asustek gave me the chance to use an engineering prototype of the Eee PC 701 on Wednesday, one day after it was announced by Jonney Shih, the company's chairman, and Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group. Since Shih revealed few details of the machine's specifications, I was looking forward to a closer look. And I came away impressed: this little notebook has a shot at making a big impact on the market for ultraportable computers. And competitors like Palm, which recently announced itsÂ $599 Foleo ultraportable notebook, should pay attention. Jointly developed by Intel and Asustek, the Eee PC will hit the market during the third quarter, most likely in August or September. The notebook will be aimed at education users, but it should also be available more widely. Prices are going to start at $199, rising based on the amount of flash memory that comes with the machine instead of a hard disk. Currently, Asustek plans to sell models with 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB of flash, but that may change between now and when the first Eee PCs go on sale. Measuring 22.5 centimeters wide by 16.5 cm deep, the Eee PC 701 is 3.5 cm thick with the screen closed and weighs just 890 grams. Other specifications include a 7-inch monitor, a 300,000-pixel camera, 512M bytes of DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory, and Wi-Fi. Next year, Asustek plans to introduce a second Eee PC model, the 1001, which will have a 10-inch screen. Asustek isn't disclosing what processor is used inside the device, except to say it's an Intel mobile chip. One possibility is that the Eee PC is based on Intel's McCaslin ultramobile PC platform, which includes either the A100 or A110 processors, formerly codenamed Steeley. Or it could be something else. Whatever chip it's using, the Eee PC doesn't run hot. The prototype I tested had been running continuously for at least six hours when I picked it up, and the machine was barely warm to the touch. Asustek said the notebook can run for three hours on battery, which is sufficient for surfing the Web or checking e-mail, but I would like more. Unfortunately, Asustek doesn't have plans to offer an extended-life battery for the Eee PC. Hopefully it will offer extra batteries as an option. The keyboard and trackpad are slightly small due to the Eee PC's size, but I was able to type comfortably. The keyboard felt fine for typing out e-mails or surfing the Web, but I prefer a full-size keyboard for typing for an extended period of time. Like Palm's upcoming Foleo notebook, the Eee PC runs Linux instead of the Windows operating system. In the case of the Eee PC, Asustek chose to use Xandros for the operating system, the Open Office applications suite, and a Firefox browser. This helps to keep costs down and means the Eee PC boots in about 15 seconds. The Eee PC's user interface, which is still being developed, uses tabs for navigation. The prototype I tested had tabs labelled Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favorites, which contained icons for related applications and Web sites. For example, the Internet tab offered icons for surfing the Web, connecting to Wikipedia, and the Skype VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service. Overall, the Eee PC prototype showed a lot of promise. In terms of its size and capabilities, there appeared to be no obvious tradeoffs for a device that could function well as a second notebook PC for busy executives.
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The PC company will sell a unit targeting education, midsized sized business, and government users.