In addition, the Panasonic Tougbook U1 is ultra-rugged, four-foot-drop approved and provides a sealed, all-weather design. The CF-U1 also features integrated Wi-Fi; USB and SD card slots; backlit QWERTY keyboard and a 5.6" WSVGA sunlight-viewable touchscreen.

Specifications:

• New Intel Atom processor to power Windows XP or Vista
• Magnesium alloy chassis with hand strap
• Sealed all-weather rugged design
• 4 Foot drop approved
• 5.6" WSVGA sunlight-viewable LED touchscreen
• Hot-swappable twin batteries
• Up to 9 hours of battery life

The power-efficient CPU will be targeted at Atom-based desktops called nettops. Currently, Intel offers the Atom N230 processor for nettops. This chip has a slightly higher power envelope than the Atom processors built exclusively for mobile devices.

On another front, Intel showed the first eight-core Nehalem chip. Nehalem-EP, or Nehalem Efficient Performance, will be a quad-core chip for mainstream servers and workstations.

The mainstream desktop will be the Core i7. "With the i7 we have high-end desktop and extreme," said Gelsinger. The extreme edition is for overclockers, he said. Gelsinger also talked about Intel‘s plans to put graphics directly onto the same piece of silicon as the processor.

He described why Intel is putting graphics right next to the processor. "There’s a big sucking sound near the CPU. It keeps pulling things closer to it. This is uniquely enabled by Moore’s Law…and as things get closer together I’m able to drive down thermal envelopes (i.e., heat) and decrease physical form factors (i.e., enable smaller computer designs)," Gelsinger said.

Intel’s entry into the SSD market has been expected for a while and although a bit delayed, represents the start of what we expect to be a very competitive market

said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.

Initially, Intel will have 80GB and 160GB solid-state drives based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology for the consumer and notebook markets, and 32GB and 64GB drives based on single-level cell (SLC) for the enterprise market. In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB. 

The new generation of MLC-based products are an improvement over the initial SSD offerings which had a host of issues

Cohen said.

SSDs are ideally suited for the netbook category and will eventually replace (high-performance) hard-disk drives in the enterprise segment.

Still, according to Cohen – most notebooks will continue to use hard-disk drives.

Drives will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes and be based on the Serial-ATA (SATA) II interface. Generally, ultralight notebooks such as the MacBook Air, ThinkPad X300, and the just-introduced HP 2530p use 1.8-inch drives, while corporate customers use the 2.5-inch size in server environments.

Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer David Flynn sees solid-state drives as a very disruptive force in hard-disk-drive-centric enterprise storage market.

This player is good at video on demand, that guy’s good at IOPS (input/output operations per second) for database…It’s a highly fractured market. The differentiation between storage infrastructure will disappear as soon as you can put enough performance and capacity right inside the server.

Flynn echoed Intel‘s prediction that hard-disk drives will ultimately be relegated to the role that tape drives play today:

Hard disks will become the new tape (drive)…hard disks will store data…(SSDs) will house active data…very big difference…your active data tier will become a silicon tier.

It seems that VIA has already started shipping the CPUs, which means we could soon see a new Nano-powered laptops or netbooks from HP.

A first-tier notebook vendor is expected to roll out a new Nano-powered laptop sometime in October this year. Regarding the C7-M processor that is featured on HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC, it looks like a total of 500.000 have already been shipped from VIA to the American system vendor. This is an indication of HP’s expectations for this year as far as its netbook business goes.

VIA is expected to release a new form factor platform, between the end of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. The form factor’s size will be only half of that of the Pico-ITX (the company’s current smallest form factor, which measures 100 by 72 mm), which will be dubbed Mobile-ITX and will support the company’s Eden, C-7 and Nano processor-based platforms.

As for the pricing, the Core 2 Quad Q9100 will be $851, while the Core 2 Extreme QX9300 will go for $1036. Vendors are likely to charge even more for dual-core to quad-core upgrades.

Both quad-core CPUs are identical to their desktop counter-parts, albeit with a reduced FSB clock (266 MHz QDR instead of 333 MHz QDR or 400 MHz). The CPUs will also feature 12 MB of L2 cache.

Between 2008-2011 netbook and nettop shipments will together see annual double digital growth. Netbooks are expected to be shipped in a number of 47 million units over the three years, while nettops are expected to ship 60 million units.

Still, some PC vendors think that although Asustek Computer’s Eee PC has brought a new trend in netbook market, it will be difficult to pass the same experience onto nettops. The trend of traditional notebooks replacing desktop PCs has not slowed down, meaning netbooks are likely to digest sales of nettops in a similar way.

In addition, Intel has restricted the Atom platform to Mini-ITX form factor motherboards and limited memory speed and capacity, as well as disallowing support for PCI Express. These drawbacks create a specification gap between the platform and traditional entry-level desktops while pricing is not much lower. Overall, Atom nettops have a rather weak price/performance ratio.