New minilaptops powered by $44 Intel CPUs

We've seen a lot of activity lately around the concept of low-cost laptops powered by Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 and Atom CPUs, which promise decent performance and small sizes. Now DigiTimes is reporting that the CPUs to power these systems will be priced very aggressively by Intel, which means we should see these new systems at a fraction of the prices we're seeing in the current $2,000-plus UMPC market.

According to the DigiTimes report, "The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, and Celeron 575 at 2GHz and US$86...Intel has also set the price for its Atom N270 notebook CPU (Diamondville) which forms part of the company's Basic Mobile Platform at US$44."

Earlier today, Matt Elliott told us about the just-announced Atom-powered ECS G10IL mininotebook, and we snuck a peek at some leaked shots of Intel's NetBook yesterday--which looked suspiciously like Intel's Classmate PC (although we now hear the Classmate itself will be available to retailers in the near-future). All these systems, including some not-yet-announced mininotebooks from major PC makers, should fall somewhere in the $300-to-$900 range.