Top PC Makers Ship Netbooks With Intel's Dual-Core Mobile Atom

Intel on Monday said most of the top netbook vendors have jumped on the its N550 dual-core mobile Atom processor bandwagon, a release which comes at a time when the netbook PC market is growing.

New netbooks are now available from several PC vendors, including Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba, Intel said Monday.

Intel said it has already shipped about 70 million Atom processors to netbook manufacturers since 2008.

The N550 was unveiled in June at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan. It is a dual-core mobile processor with a 1.50-GHz frequency, two 512-KB cache memory components, a built-in graphics accelerator, and support for up to 2 GBs of DDR3 667MHz memory.

Both the Intel Atom N550 and its related Atom N450 single-core mobile processor support the Windows and MeeGo Linux operating systems.

The netbook PC market for now is a growing one. Analyst firm iSuppli estimates that 34.5 million netbooks will ship in 2010, up about 30 percent compared to 2009. By 2014, iSuppli expects netbook shipments to reach 58.3 million units.

Acer is the largest netbook PC maker, with shipments of 9.8 million units in 2009 for a 37-percent market share, iSuppli said. ASUS was number two in 2009, with 5.5 million units, followed by HP, Samsung, and Dell. The top five vendors account for about 90 percent of the market, iSuppli said.