Intel Corp yesterday said the price of the first Ultrabooks could be higher than US$1,000 when they make their formal debut on the market by December, but added that there would be models selling for less than that in the fourth quarter.
The US chip giant expected the first series of Ultrabooks to sell for more than US$1,000, which contradicted the “less than US$1,000 price tag” it had claimed at the Computex Taipei trade fair in June.
With shipments expected to ramp up next year, which would drive down component costs, price tags would gradually drop over time, Erik Reid, Intel’s general manager of its mobile client platform division, said in Taipei.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
PC makers such as Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Acer Inc (宏碁) and Hewlett-Packard Co have committed to the rollout of notebooks using the Ultrabook platform.
Ultrabooks, deemed competitors of Apple Inc’s super-slim MacBook Air, aim to marry the performance of a laptop with tablet-like features.
They will be thin, light and powerful, less than 21mm thick and sell at “mainstream” prices, according to Intel’s statement.
The chipmaker is optimistic that more than 40 percent of all consumer notebooks next year will use the Ultrabook platform.
However, Reid said that to achieve that penetration rate “there is a lot of work for Intel.”
Analysts are less convinced that the Ultrabook will gain as high a penetration as Intel claims.
“If Ultrabooks sell for over US$1,000, consumers could opt for better machines within that budget,” said Ryan Lee (李易聰), an analyst with Topology Research Institute (拓墣產業研究所). “Ultrabooks with [the more powerful] Intel Core i5 and i7 chips would have to sell above US$1,300 and that will deter consumers.”
Asustek, which is expected to take the lead by launching the market’s first Ultrabooks next month, said last month that its Ultrabooks would sell for more than US$1,000 unless they use the less expensive, less powerful i3 chip.
The combined cost of the chips, Microsoft Corp’s operating system and solid-state-drive storage already make up half of the Ultrabook’s cost, making it hard to drive down the average selling price, Asustek said.
To give the Ultrabook project a boost, Intel yesterday announced the activation of a US$300 million venture capital fund dedicated to its research and development.
“We expect Asia to take up a big portion of the fund, given it has a pool of original equipment and design manufacturers and this is where many innovations are coming from,” said David Flanagan, managing director of mobile communications and infrastructure at Intel Capital.
The fund will be invested over a span of three to four years in companies building hardware and software technologies for Ultrabook, he said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS