Mini PC on the rise

According

to the result of research made by Institute for Information Industry (III), the

sales volume of Mac Mini has been increasing every quarter since its

introduction last year that has influence many IT hardware makers to follow with

this new trend. Intel is actively carrying out the MoDT (Mobile on Desktop)

platform product plan, introducing the CPU and chipset dedicated for notebook

into the desktop (DT) computer application market. The conception of MoDT,

characterized by the delicate appearance, small but a complete components, low

power consumption and super silence in a single solution, which is excepted to

bring a new opportunity to the minicomputer market that has been silent for

nearly two years.

The minicomputer tide is spearheaded by Shuttle in the beginning, and then

more than 10 manufacturers such as Asus, FIC, MSI, AOpen and BenQ have made

investment in this sector in succession. Currently, minicomputer is accepted by

consumers to the highest degree in Western Europe, Japan and USA. With the MoDT

conception of Intel, AOpen has released recently a new Mini PC embedded with

Intel Celeron M and Pentium M Notebook Microprocessor. Other Taiwanese manufacturers

like ECS all have planned to develop Mini PC.

Considering the size and weight, it is unlikely for the manufacturers to

produce notebooks of larger screens. Hence, mini PC matched with large-screen

play will be an important tendency for the future. It is expected that MoDT will

create a new market segment to replace the large-size NB market. The global NB

market reached a scale of 85 million sets in 2006. From this we can predict that

the output of MoDT will amount to 850 thousand sets if it takes a market share

of one percent.

Moreover, Intel will also release the Golden Gate mini

desktop PC embedded with new-generation NB micro-processor and other key

components in the first quarter this year. The system assembly manufacturers

that have entered this market early, such as AOpen and FIC, are likely to

benefit from the orders released by Intel. It is told by foreign presses that,

under the promotion by Intel, a good many international leading manufacturers,

including HP and Gateway, all have planned to release similar platforms to

strive for the large-size NB market.