"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

We can only hope

[martinw89]

We can only hope that the popularity of netbooks will slim down web apps and speed up JavaScript implementations. There's so much bloat that some websites feel slow (after fully loading of course) on my Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. That's just unacceptable and we can all reap the benefits if netbooks lower the performance expectations of web developers. Nowadays hardware is cheaper than good development, but a little extra development can go a long way.

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.

Acer aspire one all the way.

[pavs.ma]

The listed top 10 are hardly all "netbooks". Acer Aspire One is the best of the bunch IMO; and the fact that you can customize (even Mac OS X ?) to your heart's content, gets added brownie points. Most popular Linux OS can be easily installed on the aspire one if Linpus doesn't cut it for you. Here is a list of "hacks" (whatever you wanna call it) http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/09/27/30-cool-acer-aspire-one-hacks/

Not the big deal...

[Darkness404]

The problem isn't if Netbooks can handle web apps, it is the question of if they are usable on a tiny screen. For example, Google maps, though "usable" usually requires me to zoom out a bit on Firefox 3, go to fullscreen mode, and hide the sidebar in order for me to use it on my EEE (701, 4G Surf running eeeXubuntu).

Real Web App Limitation

[IPSection]

is the 1024x600 resolution of these netbooks. A lot of website and webapps are designed for a minimum of 1024x768. Those missing pixels do make a difference ....

Web 2.0

[OrangeTide]

If your modern web apps can't run on a 1.6Ghz dual core or hyperthreaded CPU. then I think I'll blame the web apps and not the CPU. Does the Internet have to be this hard? What sort of supercomputer tasks does it take to render an interactive webpage?

These performance claims are questionable

[Lord Byron II]

Intel keeps saying that it's Atom processors aren't heavy duty, but I think that's marketing spin to avoid taking the bottom out of the market for the more profit-laden processors.

I recently compared the Eee PC to my laptop. The Eee PC was able to calculate prime numbers at about 90% of the rate of my existing three-year old laptop. So, on a processor-to-processor comparison, they are about even. But the Eee PC also has three years of better hard drive, bus, and memory technology, and I expect it to fully whoop my laptop there.

Basically, I view these netbooks as having the same power as a 2-3 year old average laptop, but in a smaller form factor.