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Blurring Lines — Dual Core Atom To Lift Netbooks
CWmike writes "'The next innovation coming to Atom is on dual-core,' Intel CEO Paul Otellini said recently of the company's low-end chips, which delivered the modern netbook but also found their way into embedded devices, and in the future, into mobile devices like smartphones. His statement comes after close to two years of accelerated growth, and with the initial euphoria around netbooks now subsiding. HP has already advertised a new netbook, the Hewlett-Packard Mini 210, running Intel's upcoming N455 chip, one of the Atom-series processors, on Amazon.de. The N455 supports DDR3 memory, an upgrade over the DDR2 memory in most netbooks today. The DDR3-capable processors should allow data to be exchanged faster between the memory and CPU, translating to better overall netbook performance. Prices of laptops have been falling and the days of netbooks being a novelty have disappeared, said Jay Chou, research analyst at IDC. Laptops are bridging the pricing gap with netbooks, while offering better performance. 'You're getting something really attractive in the $600 range for better-performing notebooks,' Chou said. 'The original intended message of letting people expect netbooks to behave differently or less effectively is not really ringing.'"
How much more performance do we need before we all say: "enough."? Computers years ago already passed the good-enough mark for normal usage. The only thing that still drives processors are transcoding and games really. Give it another year or two and I'm sure I won't even look at the spec for what processor is in a machine I buy: of course it will be fine. What do you think this will mean for new computer sales? Will people jump off the upgrade treadmill and simply wait until their current machine dies before purchasing a new one? The inflationary days of selling computing hardware may just be over: now we seem to be getting into a saturated sector. What will manufacturers do to replace those sales?
Shh.
I would kind of doubt that. The ability to easily swap hardware in a full desktop rig will trump laptops any time. Moreover, desktops usually offer more powerful hardware options.
Although I agree, it's worth pointing out that in the past ten years laptops have gone from monolithic everything-on-board devices to reasonably pluggable, at least at the larger end. My GIGANTIC desktop replacement from Sager has a desktop motherboard and graphics card (and a battery life of about 10 minutes new).
My older laptop from Dell I upgraded the gfx card from one laptop form factor card to another. Also laptop ram is pretty interchangeable, except for that nasty shit Apple pulls with the differing electronegativity.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Not fitting in the slot or BSDing on boot is kinda mean but it does no permanent damage. The Apple thing not only damages your property but is intended to gradually become less reliable to mislead the customer into thinking that non-Apple RAM is low quality.
I just got generic ram and it worked fine, by the way. Maybe I got lucky or something, I do think it was kingston. Whatever, I'm a pretty loyal Sager customer now for the big cindreblock desktop replacements and I'll stick to Lenovo Thinkpads for now for the smaller ones, though that may well change based on what I've been hearing about their newer models
I can't believe I'm defending Dell, it's pretty out of character, but this is one case where it makes sense.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I want something $200 that can browse the full web
Part of the problem here would be that "the full web" includes things like flash - which can bring a reasonably decent machine to its knees without too much effort. Flash games, such as those made by Zynga (think Cafe World and Farmville) are especially heinous in this regard - I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox (with a single tab/window) running their bloated, poorly-coded flash games. This was on a machine that, while not top-of-the-line, is quite adequate for pushing World of Warcraft at a playable framerate (even in Dalaran, instances, and battlegrounds, for those of you for whom this metric will mean anything).
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I approve. I've been testing a dual-core nVidia ION setup for use as a thin-client at work, and it's worlds apart from my eeepc 901 netbook at home. It's almost indistinguishable from a real desktop unless I run FPU-intensive apps on it.
The Atom 330 runs 64-bit code, the dual cores keep it from stuttering and pausing like my eeepc, and the nVidia GPU make it perform well on movies and light 3D, whereas the Intel GPU has lots of artifacts and is slow under Linux (and the newer pinetrail cores use the crappy PowerVR GMA500 chipsets that aren't supported under most Linux distros unless you manage to shoehorn in the one binary blob driver thy occasionally release for a particular version of ubuntu),
I'm waiting for ION2 nettops to come out, and then I'm planning on using one to replace my 24x7 home Linux server. I think this is the real market for these devices, small nettops and netbooks that you can just drop in anywhere for $200 - $400 to do one specific task and just forget about. There will always be a "real" computer somewhere in the house for gaming or heavy-duty web browsing or whatever, but most households will only buy 1 every few years. These cheap devices are at a price point where people say "yeah, I could throw one in the car to use as a large-screen GPS" or "I could put one behind the TV so it could play movies and show photo screensavers".
Once they reach the $50 - $100 range, they'll sell even more, since people could start buying them as presents, and you'd have a lot of useless stuff left around. I wish the older Palm Pilots were here already, it would be great to have little touchscreens lying around everywhere to use as remote controls or music players or something :-/
What I've heard is that memory isn't the bottleneck in Atom CPPU's. As such, DDR3 really won't improve performance at all -- and is really just a marketing bullet point to charge higher prices with.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I am a software developer and have not used a desktop since 2005, my current rig is a HP EliteBook Core Duo 2.4, 8gb of RAM and a 500gb 7200rpm drive running at 1680x1050, I run VM's as my dev environment and barely hear the fan running even when the VM is fired up. I guess if you buy consumer grade laptops to do dev work on then you probably will suffer with bad performance. Buy the right tool for the job and you will never have a problem no matter what you do.
Some very good points - but you could remedy a few of those by building your own.
I just picked up a barebones laptop chassis, T5250 CPU (ebay), 4GB of RAM (ebay), and 500GB 2.5" 7200RPM HDD for $280 CAD taxed and shipped.
The cheapest laptop I saw with a 7200RPM HDD was $700 from Dell.
Battery life? Old Merom CPU? Who cares - it's still way faster than a netbook, and costs less too! The best part - it has a 12 inch screen, and decent size keyboard - oh, and a DVD drive.
Unfortunately, it's bright pink, so it's going to another family member.
For now, I shall stick with desktop beasts. I wouldn't be happy without my quad-core CPU and WD Black HDDs.