Aaron Lee, Taipei; Joseph Tsai

 

Executives from Intel's PC partners - Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin and Compal Electronics president Ray Chen both have invoked Intel to help drop the Ultrabook price to below US$1,000 by reducing the CPU price.

Lin pointed out that Intel plans to have Ultrabook priced below US$1,000, but if the company still refuses to provide a subsidy over CPU price, brand vendors are likely to adopt a lower-end processor or reduce the component specifications to meet the price goal, but the related system performance may be significantly reduced, while vendors' willingness of pushing Ultrabook will also be weakened.

Chen also pointed out that Intel's current CPU price is unlikely to help the company achieve its goal of having 40% of consumer notebooks being Ultrabooks. He added that if Ultrabooks suffer from weak sales, while Apple continues to enjoy strong profit, the Wintel alliance will need to do something or else all the related IT player may be gone together.

Sources from PC players also pointed out that within a notebook's cost, CPU and operating system account for the highest proportion, followed by ultra-thin components such as panel and solid state drives (SSD). Since brand vendors are unable to reduce their component cost due to the related shipments are still low, vendors are cutting their quotes to notebook ODMs by more than 50% to maintain their own profitability.

However, so far, Intel still has not yet had any movement about providing subsidies over CPU prices, the sources added.