"Netbooks" Move Up In Notebook Rankings

Ian Lamont writes "For the first time, a list of popular notebook reviews shows three 'netbooks' in the top 10. The netbooks use Intel's Atom processor. Notebookreview.com's editor says there has never been more than one netbook in its monthly ratings. The reason for the netbooks' sudden popularity no doubt relates to the price and basic functionality, but there's a catch. Despite calling Atom a 'high-performance' chip, Intel cautions people not to confuse netbooks with notebooks, as netbooks will be unable to take on video editing or other processor-intensive tasks. This leads to the question of how netbooks will be able to handle demanding Web apps — or whether Web apps will have to be slimmed down to accommodate millions of netbook owners."

Comments

Re:We can only hope

[glwtta]

We can only hope that the popularity of netbooks will slim down web apps and speed up JavaScript implementations.

At least that one's a solved problem: V8, TraceMonkey, SquirrelFish - the next generation of JS engines in the major browsers (with the obvious exception) are orders of magnitude faster than the current releases (in the literal 10 or 100 times faster sense). No idea what's going on with IE8, though.

I've heard claims that some of them are approaching the performance of unoptimized (ie -O0) native C, for what that's worth.

Also just saw some demos of GPU-accelerated animation in the <canvas> tag - it's really looking like we are in for a major shakeup as far as browser performance goes.