Intel left no one in doubt that the competition for inexpensive and sleek Windows 7-ready laptops will heat up. Both CEOs acknowledged this new and booming market during several conference conversations, after their various companies reported their earnings earlier this week. Inexpensive and light weight ultrathin laptops typically run between 5- and 800 dollars come with an only slightly more meaningful price tag than Netbooks.

Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO, proclaimed that his company is already revving up to supply even more power-efficient chips that include 2 processing cores to better improve performance. He says that most of the products that have already shipped were merely single-cored versions of the same products. He goes on to say that we should expect quite a few laptops to pop up in the retail stores with the dual-core around the holiday season.

Afterwards, Dirk Meyer, who is AMD’s CEO, chimed in with his two cents, promising a new array of products over the next couple of years, which will be mainly focused around smaller notebooks. He said that in the immediate future, we can look forward to a much more broad assortment of ultrathins near Christmas.
The ultrathin market wasn’t all that popular until recently because of the fact that these laptops were not that much different than netbooks. Researchers at IDC assure us that, once these dual-core bad boys hit the shelves, we will be seeing a much bigger, faster difference. As if the lightweight, blazing fast laptops weren’t creating enough hype on their own, most of them will be equipped with the popular Windows 7 OS.

As with most newer models being released, Hp’s Pavilion dm3 will be hitting shelves on October 22, side-by-side with Windows 7. This little baby starts at only $549 with an AMD, and $649 with an Intel. Other well-known untlrathins include Acer Aspire Timeline ($548, available readily at Wal-Mart), & Dell’s $549 Inspiron 13.

Some theorize that Intel finds ultrathins so profitable because they are more expensive than Netbooks. They’re whole idea is to simply make it cheap enough that people will put up the extra money for an ultrathin with their name on it, rather than some Netbook.

AMD believes in focusing only on the difference between less-well-known Netbooks, and very mainstream notebooks. AMD also claims that it created the category of “ultrathin” more out of a partnership with HP than anything else.