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.