"Atom's low-powered consumption ... is like 10 watts. The lowest you'd ever get with Celeron or Centrino is 15-20 watts," Brookwood said. For a tablet PC, that is very impressive, and if it allows for a smaller battery, that's important, he said.

"I don't think you could build a tablet PC in that form factor with even a low-powered Centrino," Brookwood said. Laptops like Fujitsu products, with Atom, could cut into shipments of the lower-end processors, but the laptop is new and results have yet to be seen, Brookwood said.

Atom might bite into sales of Celerons first, followed by Pentium dual-core chips, which are on the lower end, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. With expenditure in check, people may instead opt for Atom-based systems.

"So far, there is not a lot of evidence that has happened, but it is certainly an area of concern," McCarron said.

The use of the Atom processor is evolving, said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman.