Atom to take half of entry desktop sales

Fair point, my bad :-)

My Acer Aspire One works just fine with the Intel Atom processor and 1 GB of RAM.

The same would be of course true for a tiny motherboard with the same configuration in a desktop enclosure.

BUT, for games and other CPU-time intensive applications, things look a bit different. The Intel Atom cannot compete with the Intel i7, no way.
Unless Intel and other PC motherboard makers redesign the PC. A modular design would help Intel Atom. Why not add CPU cards and memory cards, like in a VME bus solution, just smaller. The dump PC motherboard is what prevents people from adding more Intel Atoms, more memory, more CPU performance, into their desktop PC, and servers.

The server market would require only CPU cards, memory cards, and a few controller cards, all connected through one bus, without that stupid, bulky, limited PC motherboard. What matters is CPU performance per electrical power consumption.

If AMD and Intel cannot reinvent the PC, maybe ARM can.

Other than the size or style (and maybe the power consumption/CO2 footprint for those who know or care) the reason for a buying a nettop is beyond me. A colleague of mine is paying 300 euro for an Asus EEE Box B202; with 200 I would build a rig with an Athlon X2 6000+, 4GB of RAM, 750GB HDD and a DVD Burner.

And could use the remaining 100 to buy a decent graphics card for gaming.

... the harder it’s going to be to justify paying Microsoft’s usual price for a copy of Dimdows.

i bet you cant load wow in 2 seconds with an atom like i can :P.can you even oc an atom ?

im just kidding but my real question is that what if there were a 10 core atom on desktop at 20nm O.o...that wouldn't be a bad idea!

I run Win 7 on my EEE 900a and it runs fine. I can actually boot into the OS faster than my Motorola Q takes to boot into Win Mobile. I did install a 90 MB/s SSD. Makes all the difference and it was less than 40 bucks.

I bet I can boot into my OS, Open Firefox and read the inquirer faster than 90% of the users on the internet.

"Atom coupled with a reasonable amount (512kB+) RAM will be fast enough for most mainstream users."

An Atom with 512kB of RAM sounds an awful lot like the scientific calculator Ratty is talking about......

I'm not sure anyone could expect an Atom to run Vista. Maybe there will be a low power build of Win7?

Atom coupled with a reasonable amount (512kB+) RAM will be fast enough for most mainstream users. Web video is probably the most demanding application they'll run, and that's typically fine. Celerons and the like are only painful because they're historically coupled with low memory and slow disks, chipsets etc.

I know there's a credit crunch on, but why put Atom's into low end PCs. People only end up disappointed in Celeron and Sempron PC performance anyway, why make it worse by sticking something into a desktop machine which is more at home in a scientific calculator?
Don't get me wrong, Netbooks are great, but you are paying for low power usage and portability and you expect a slight performance hit, when you buy a desktop you want it to be fast and with one of those buried in it, they just won't be, or at least not as fast as you'd hope.

Intel should totally take AMD to court over possibly violating their x86 agreement and then make even more money... oh wait.