Notebooks outship desktops for first time

Worldwide notebook computer shipments topped those of desktops for the first time ever in the third quarter, research group iSuppli said on Tuesday, calling it a "watershed event" for the industry.

Shipments of notebook PCs surged nearly 40 percent to 38.6 million units, while desktop shipments fell 1.3 percent to 38.5 million.

Overall, PC shipments rose 15.4 percent in the quarter to 79 million units.

Acer Inc shipped almost 3 million more notebooks in the third quarter than in the previous quarter, with the majority being netbooks, iSuppli said. The Taiwanese company is now the third largest PC company by market share at 12.2 percent, less than two percentage points behind second-place Dell Inc.

Hewlett-Packard Co maintained its lead at No. 1, shipping 14.9 million units for an 18.8 percent market share.

Apple Inc lost nearly half a point of market share from the second quarter. The company's 3.2 percent share places it seventh overall in total shipments.

ISuppli raised slightly its 2008 unit growth forecast. It now expects 13 percent growth this year, up from its previous 12.5 percent forecast.

For 2009, the group expects unit growth of 4.3 percent.

Intel to launch quad-core notebook CPU in 3Q08

Intel is planning to launch its first quad-core CPU for notebooks, the Core 2 Extreme QX9300, in the third quarter this year with pricing set at a new high of US$1,038 in thousand-unit tray quantities, according to sources at motherboard makers.

With the market demand for top-level notebooks still below average, Intel expects the quad-core notebook CPUs will not become standard in the performance/mainstream notebook market until the second half of 2009, and therefore should not impact the desktop PC market, noted the sources.

The Core 2 Extreme QX9300 will be manufactured at 45nm and have a core frequency of 2.53GHz. The CPU will come in a socket P package and support FSB speeds up to 1066MHz. The chip will include 12MB L2 cache and have a maximum TDP of 45W.