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Intel to expand Little Valley

by on10 January 2008

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Big on low-cost PCs


Intel's ultra-low cost mini ITX board won't be a one of a kind, and Intel is very keen on building a market around its Little Valley platform, although they're not as greedy as you'd think (well, maybe).

First of all, don't expect to see SiS chipsets on future revisions, as Intel will be using one of their own chipsets, some crippled 945/946 variant with support for only a single PCI slot looks to be the future of the platform.

There is, of course, the embedded Intel CPU, as well, and from what we've heard, the next generation CPU will lose the L2 cache. Let's hope this turns out to be a better chipset than the early Celeron processors without L2 cache.

Intel is also trying to get the big system integrators onboard, as well as the motherboard manufacturers, although we'd guess this would be of more interest to the OEM/ODM manufacturers than to the consumer motherboard companies.

Intel has put in force some fairly strict guidelines on how these new components are to be used, as these products are solely meant for the entry level end of the market, and it looks like this will be Intel's only single core CPU later this year.

The question is whether the market is there; but at least Intel seems to think so, as it should be far more affordable than a low-cost notebook and it should be possible to connect it to a wide range of screens, even TVs, if you haven't got anything better. Time will tell, but we should see the first products arrive later this year.
Last modified on 12 January 2008
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