Last year Computex was all about netbooks; Asus expanded its Eee PC line with bigger screen models, MSI countered with its 10-inch Wind, vendors churned out several cost-effective SSD upgrades for these machines, Canonical talked up its Netbook Remix edition of Ubuntu and more. While netbooks remain hot items in this year’s show, it seems as though chip vendors and PC manufacturers are slowly moving towards a higher-performance “ultrathin notebook” segment, looking to replicate this success but enjoying higher margins.

With this in mind Intel has announced the new consumer ultra-low voltage Pentium SU2700 and Intel GS40 chipset, intended to bring ultraportable designs to comparably low-cost but still reasonably fast systems. The new 45nm chip is clocked at 1.3GHz, uses an 800MHz front side bus, sports 2MB of L2 cache and like others in the CULV family consumes 10W or less of thermal peak power. Both Asus and Acer said they will build laptops with the chip, while Lenovo and MSI have already launched their own CULV-based systems.

Besides continuing the push of its ultra-low voltage platform, Intel also updated its full-size mobile processors with three new parts, including its first to cross the 3GHz mark; the 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo T9900. Also announced today were the 2.8GHz P9700 with 6MB L2 cache and the P8800 which runs at 2.66GHz with 3MB of L2 cache.