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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.'"
First netbooks had small screens and awesome battery life. Then they made bigger screens, which used more battery. Then they put in larger and larger spinning hard drives, faster processors, and now dual-core?
So we go from a tiny, long-lived netbook to a large (and heavy) powerful and short-lived netbook. Also known as a laptop.
What's next - a high end graphics card so people can play games?
I have one of the early EeePCs - I think it's the 900A - with a 4GB SSD and a 9 inch screen. It runs for at least 5 hours, and depending on the pants I wear it can fit into a cargo pocket. *That's* a netbook.
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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.
What this article should say is that new lower-power dual-core Atoms are about to be released.
The ability to easily swap hardware in a full desktop rig will trump laptops any time.
Yeah, for the enthusiast market. For the general population, swapping computer hardware is on the same level as tweaking the dishwasher for more hot-water spraying action.
As others have already mentioned, dual-core Atom processors have been out for 2 years, so a dual-core Atom is nothing new.
As regards the support of DDR3 memory, it's unlikely to make any measurable performance difference over DDR2 given the relatively anaemic CPU performance of the Atom. The reason is far more prosaic. DDR3 is now cheaper than DDR2 and that trend will continue so Intel are doing the right thing in moving the chipset support over to the less expensive memory. In a budget platform anything else would be foolish.
Barely had the netbook started hitting the mainstream that they were getting bigger screens, bigger drives, more weight, less battery life, bigger price tag. Most of them very quickly became just crap laptops.
Most of them are seem terrible value. For around 10%-15% more you can get something that at least holds itself to the standard of a low-end laptop, with a much more powerful type of "1.6ghz cpu" and other components yet after a few months the battery life is practically the same. The weight is for all intents and purposes very similar.
Netbooks were good because they were less than two-thirds the price of a laptop, were far more portable (could be forgotten about in a basic satchel), had long batteries. While the spec looked low, general use was actually snappy because it was using SSD and a light OS. You only noticed the performance loss when doing things that actually required decent horsepower (though choppy flash video was a bit of a weakness), which wasn't something you'd want a netbook for anyway.
The summary suggests laptops became cheaper to bridge the gap between them and netbooks. I think it was much more than netbooks turned into laptops.
1 core for you, 1 core for Norton...
while most laptops are maxed-out when they come from the factory.
Since when? Most laptops come with one DIMM of the lowest density RAM they can put in the machine and are easily upgradeable. RAM is one of the only components that can easily be upgrades in almost all laptops except Macs and some Dell Latitude E-series machines since you only have to open a service door or remove the palm rest to upgrade RAM.
If a screen breaks on a desktop you either drag out that $7 CRT you picked up a few years back at a garage sale or buy a ~$200 or less monitor, or, if you have a good graphics card, just use your HDTV.
Every laptop has some form of display out (VGA, HDMI, or DisplayPort) that can be used to hook up a monitor, projector, or HDTV (especially one that isn't crippled to 1024x768). The machine is still usable at that point even if you lose portability. Almost every one also has USB and most have bluetooth so you can hook up external devices.
If your power supply dies on a laptop and the laptop is out of warranty, the laptop is dead. If your power supply dies on your desktop you just throw in a new one.
LOLWUT??? You realize that there are very few laptops with external power supplies. The AC/DC conversion usually happens in the AC adapter, and it can be replaced by a ~$100 vendor specific or $50 universal AC adapter.
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