First shanzhai all-in-on desktop arrives with a Pine Trail heart

What we have here is a first attempt at an all-in-one desktop PC from a shanzhai company. The product itself is known as the K1850 and perhaps what's most significant about it, at least in terms of hardware, is that it runs Intel's new Pineview processor, namely the new Atom D1850 chip. The K1850 also sports an 18.5 inch display, (no word on touch capabilities - but come on...you'd certainly hope so), with a 250GB hard drive, 2GB of DDR2, a DVD ROM, built-in audio, USB ports, LAN, Wi-Fi and a 3 in 1 card reader.

Before I go further, let's take a look at the desktop segment in general:

The good old desktop has been losing ground to mobile computing solutions at a steady pace for years, and while still the mainstay for PC gamers and a long time hold out for business and enterprise customers, the desktop is still facing near extinction within a decade. At least that's my prediction.

Recent trends in PC design have edged towards smaller, lighter, thinner designs that place less emphasis on sheer performance metrics and more on battery life or power draw. In fact you could argue that the growth of the netbook market was fueled by the emergence of the under-powered, energy-sipping Intel Atom processor, and particularly the N270 and N280 chips which currently power just about every netbook out there.

The nettop category as outlined by Intel a year also uses the Atom platform, which was intended to invigorate the desktop segment, infusing it with affordable '2nd PCs' for or kitchens and dens etc. It was an almost universal failure, consumers saw only an over-priced, under-powered product, albeit one that used less space and power.

The nettop PC may have flopped in the malls of mainstream America, who frankly like their products to be oversized, not undersized, but that's not to say that the desktop is dead just yet. At Computex, Taipei and then at IFA Berlin earlier this year, we saw a raft of shiny new all-in-one PCs making debut twirls about the show floor. The all-in-one has arrived on the scene as the successor to the nettop in the race to save the relevancy of a dying PC segment.


Western Opportunity Analysis:

Clocked at 1.66GHz, the D510 CPU, as a Pineview chip, differs from previous Atom platforms in that it combines the memory controller in the CPU itself (AMD were first to do this years ago - Intel's i5 and i7 now also do this), thus reducing power consumption and memory latency across the platform as a whole.

The D510 chip in the K1850 is a dual-core version of its D410 cousin. Both are aimed at the desktop market. The new N450 will eventually go in netbooks, eventually replacing the N270 and N280. All new Pineview chips use  the new NM10 chipset (codenemed Tigerpoint for all you codename junkies), which when combined, make up the Pine Trail platform. Benefits include higher memory bandwidth (and lower overall power consumption.

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