Earlier this month the rumor of sub a $200 netbook from ASUS made the rounds and sure enough, come Computex, we saw the budget-end Eee PC X101 priced at $199. There are a couple of reasons why this netbook has hit rock-bottom pricing; MeeGo instead of Windows 7, lower build-quality and lower end specs of which the key parts are the new Intel Atom N435 processor and a 3-cell battery.
As you may have suspected, it is indeed based on current-gen Pine Trail and it slots in at the bottom just below the Intel Atom N450 processor, clocking in at 1.33GHz, 512K of cache and a 5W TDP. Compare that to the N450 and N455 which clock in at 1.66GHz and have TDPs of 5.5W and 6.5W respectively. AMD’s newly announced Z-01 APU comes in at 5.9W with vastly superior performance but obviously it won’t be anywhere near the price of these chips. I’d wager most regular people find single core Pine Trail Atom chips to be slow but perhaps the better optimized MeeGo can breath new life into the aging Pine Trail chips, especially for the emerging markets that these netbooks are aimed at.
The sub $200 netbook lineup consists of the above mentioned ASUS Eee PC X101, Lenovo IdeaPad S100, Aspire One Happy 2 and Samsung N100. We’ve only had hands on with the first two so far.
Source: PC World via Liliputing
