Intel Wants to Control ATOM’s Usage

We already talked about the new cheap Intel ATOM CPU, as its price can make it the dedicated processor for many notebooks and devices in current economic slow-down. It turns out that Intel is acting in order to define the market for each of its CPU offers, to prevent more expensive CPU to be banned by PC manufacturers and OEM.
So, Intel does not want to see Dual core ATOM to end up in netbook as it requires a fan, so if your need more power you need a Dual Core Core 2 Duo. Officially, Intel does not want dual Core ATOM to be associated with low performance notebook (or netbook), so the founder is adding some restriction for the use of its products to preserve market segmentations and its margins for its CPU offers.
This new restriction comes after the first one that limits the display of an ATOM-power notebook to 10.2" or 1 GB of RAM. However, Dell already obtained a grant for an exception, and HP is currently trying to get a similar one too. On a market where AMD does not offer competitive CPUs to Intel's solutions, and other CPU manufacturers have problems to bring products able to compete, Intel is trying to define CPU usage. (not sure that this is fully legal, one should maybe ask the EC to have a look at it...)