Techo Bee: Unlaunched Atom-smasher shows up in Samsung X series laptops

Samsung announced its new X series of laptops this morning, and the company let a detail slip about the X120 portable that's less trivial than it may initially sound: the thin portable eschews Intel's netbook-oriented Atom line in favor of a new ultra-low-voltage (ULV) processor from Intel. The SU4100 ULV processor and its siblings will formally launch later this month and have been getting press recently under the internal Intel acronym CULV (for consumer ULV). These cheap ULV processors mark a subtle but important shift in the chipmaker's notebook strategy, and they also spell bad news for rival AMD.

Intel has been putting out ULV variants of its notebook chips for years; these parts have significantly lower power usage than their regular mobile counterparts, while keeping the same performance levels. Because of this combination of low power and high performance, they've historically commanded a significant premium over normal notebook chips, making ULV-based portables a rare, expensive, and often Japanese luxury.

The netbook craze has made it clear that there is a huge consumer appetite for the combination of small form factor and large battery life that the Atom-based machines offered, but many netbook users have been frustrated enough with Atom's anemic performance that they've actually returned the machines to the store. Anecdotally, many netbook purchasers thought they were buying a small, very cheap laptop with great battery life, only to get the device out of the box and find that you get what you pay for, performance-wise.

So going into the first part of 2009, there was a huge price and performance gap between the Atom-based netbook and its higher-end, C2D-based notebook relatives. AMD made a run at this gap with its Yukon platform, and at this past CES we handled a few netbook-like portables based on these parts. But Intel isn't going to leave this space to AMD.
Like a netbook, but way better

The ULV processors that power the upcoming Samsung X series haven't technically launched, but when they do, Intel confirmed to Ars that they will be "similar in specs" to the ULV processors that the company recently launched this past June, but cheaper.

"In general, these [upcoming ULV parts] are priced lower than those," an Intel spokesperson told Ars. "The intent was to enable those kinds of form factors, but at more mainstream price points."

In other words, notebooks powered by the new ULV line will have a netbook form factor coupled with notebook performance, at a price that puts them in between Atom-based netbook and upcoming Nehalem-based notebooks.

While the chipmaker wouldn't give us any more detail on the specs of the new chips, Samsung has spilled a few of the beans by revealing on its site that the CPU in the X120 is the as-yet-unannounced 1.3GHz Intel Pentium ULV SU4100 with 800MHz FSB and 1MB cache. Note that the normal SU9x00 series has 3MB of cache at speeds ranging from 1.2GHz to 1.6GHz, so Intel is clearly cutting back on the amount of cache in the new parts to justify the lower prices. There's little doubt that the S4100 ULV and its siblings will fit within the same 10W TDP as the existing ULV line, and enable the same form factors (~11 inch screens, between 0.8 and 1" thick) and battery life (7 hours or more), but at prices that put the resulting machines in the $600 to $1,000 range.

In all, a line of Core- and Core 2-based ULV parts aimed right at the price/performance gap between Atom and the forthcoming Nehalem mobile variant is great news for netbook users who love the netbook form factor but hate the performance enough that they would pay a roughly $200 premium for a real CPU. The new ULV parts will also make AMD's job harder, and one has to wonder if they won't hurt Atom a bit, as well.

In terms of performance, the year-old Core Solo that powers the Samsung Q1UP tablet whips Atom up and down the block, and does so in a unit that's 2lb and has a five-hour battery life. This being the case, you'll have to really want to save the $200 or so to opt for the Atom and take such a massive performance hit.

The Samsung X series doesn't have a stateside price or launch date, yet, but the UK price suggests that the X120 will be around $1,000. That's enough to put it well into "notebook" territory and out of the reach of a move-up netbook buyer, but cheaper notebooks based on the lower-end members of the upcoming ULV line (the SU4100 is definitely not at the bottom of what will be announced) should start showing up before long.