After the end of the formal executives presentations at the Intel Investor conference, I wandered around the demo area set up in the same building, looking for some cool new technologies. To me the most interesting one was, "news oblige", the Atom booth where Intel engineers were showing prototypes of Nettops using the upcoming low-power Atom processor, marketed as being the "smallest [and slowest?] element of computing".

I chatted with Nettop general manager Noury Al-Khaledy (pictured) about his Atom-based desktop that could sell at the super low price of 200 dollars. Inspite the Atom CPU basic performance, about half the Celeron (the chip inside ASUS' Eee PC), I thought it was indeed enough power to surf the web or watch a standard definition movie/video.

"It's purposed built from the ground up to deliver an Internet centric usage model. Very simply what that means is, if you want to surf the Web... It does that great... It's a consumption based machine (social networking, web browsing, very light editing)... It's a very aspirational box for someone who's trying to do a Net type of experience. If for example you want to watch HD video or you want to decode or encode videos, then we'll be looking at a Core 2 Duo box... Pricing will be around $199 to $250 price range... The mobile version of that, you would expect a $250 to $299 price range", said Al-Khaledy.

And as a souvenir, Intel gave all the conference attendees a sample of the Atom chip... pretty cool!