Big discounts for big vendors

Digitimes is reporting that Intel is aggressively promoting its CULV platform and offering significant discounts to leading notebook manufacturers.

The big three, HP, Acer and Dell, have been offered CPUs at $65 a piece, while Asus and MSI are getting them for $70 to $75. Intel's official pricelist states that the Celeron 723 costs $106 in 1k quantities, and that's down from $161, following a recent price cut.

Intel is expected to officially launch its CULV series processors on April 19th. While the cheapest CULV parts, such as the aforementioned Celeron, will end up affordable, more powerful dual-core CPUs will cost $300+.

Most major vendors have jumped the CULV bandwagon, and we should start seeing the first models in late April. The market reacted well to cheap Atom based netbooks, and vendors are hoping they can capitalize on slightly more expensive, but much more serious CULV-based machines with 11 to 13-inch panels.

In related news, AMD's Neo is expected to hit retail in a few days time, in the form of HP's DV2. However, this is AMD's only Neo design win to date, at least that we're aware of.

More here.