Ultralight Convertibles Approaching Desktop Performance

MojoKid writes Laptops with fully articulating hinges are starting to show up from more vendors than just Lenovo, though the company certainly got some mileage out of their Yoga brand of machines. Now it appears HP is getting in on the action as well, with the new HP Spectre X360 that's powered by Intel's new Core i5-5200U Broadwell-based processor with integrated Intel HD 5500 series graphics, along with 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory, a 256GB Solid State Drive (a Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD), 802.11ac WiFi, and a 13.3" Full HD (1920x1080) multi-touch screen. The Spectre X360 has a geared and spring-assisted hinges. The hinges swing open easily, and then offer more resistance as the screen is moved into an upright position, or swung around into tent, stand, or tablet modes. What's also interesting about this new breed of convertibles, beyond just its ability to contort into tablet mode and various other angles, is that performance for these ultralight platforms is scaling up nicely, with faster, low-power processors and M.2 PCIe Solid State Drives offering up a very responsive experience and under 10 second boot times. It has gotten to the point that 3 pound and under notebooks feel every bit as nimble as desktop machines, at least for mainstream productivity and media consumption usage models.

Comments

Now if they will sell them without MS Windows

[innocent_white_lamb]

If they will sell them without MS Windows (and the "secure" bios and so forth and so on) then I'll be interested.

It used to be that I could zip down to Staples and purchase a laptop, bring it home, format it, install my favourite Linux version, and life would go on.

The last time I tried that I spent TWO SOLID DAYS at Staples trying to find a laptop that would boot with my Linux "live cd" flash drive.

I guess that the next time I need a laptop I'll have to mail order it from one of the Linux Laptop vendors that advertise online if I want something that will work properly.

Re:Now if they will sell them without MS Windows

[Kjella]

The last time I tried that I spent TWO SOLID DAYS at Staples trying to find a laptop that would boot with my Linux "live cd" flash drive.

You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot, then it should load on all of them. If it would boot your Linux distro it'd also boot whatever malware was trying to trojan Windows and that's exactly what they're trying to avoid. At least so far I haven't heard of any x86 machine where you can't do that, I'm sure that'd be major news both here and elsewhere if they started to block that.

Re:Now if they will sell them without MS Windows

[Duckman5]

You need to go into the BIOS and disable secure boot.

You don't even need to do that if you pick your linux version properly. I just finished installing Sabayon/Linux on my Lenovo U430p laptop after I decided I was going to reformat it anyway because of the recent Superfish fiasco. We've had a working secure boot shim for over 2 years now. No need to disable secure boot. Red Hat and Ubuntu both support it as well if you're looking for something a little more mainstream. At worst you may need to register a key with the BIOS (I did for Sabayon), but I'm not sure you even need to do that with Red Hat since their shim is actually signed by MS.

Re: Now if they will sell them without MS Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought the Lenovo Edge Flex 15 and on Linux the Wifi card doesn't work, period. The only "fix" is to wait until 3.20 kernel adds support. Piece of shit OS or piece of shit Lenovo for not ensuring Linux compatibility? (Anyway, the keyboard sucks, so don't buy it)

Re:Now if they will sell them without MS Windows

[Duckman5]

Seriously?! Which part of that doesn't take a month to understand for someone that just wants to zip down to staples and grab a laptop with the expectation the install media will "just work" like it always has done for the last decade?

To use it, rename shim.efi to bootx64.efi and put it in /EFI/BOOT on your UEFI install media. Drop MokManager.efi in there as well. Finally, make sure your bootloader binary is called grubx64.efi and put it in the same directory.

Now generate a certificate and put the public half as a binary DER file somewhere on your install media. On boot, the end-user will be prompted with a 10-second countdown and a menu. Choose "Enroll key from disk" and then browse the filesystem to select the key and follow the enrolment prompts. Any bootloader signed with that key will then be trusted by shim, so you probably want to make sure that your grubx64.efi image is signed with it.

This part:

Secure Boot bootloader for distributions available now
Nov. 30th, 2012 07:51 pm

That link, as the text following the hyperlink says, is an announcement from 2 years ago. I referenced it to show how long this software has been available for use in other distributions.
Also, how many people who fit into your "just works" category are going to be making their own boot media? or managing their /boot partition manually? Zero. The hard part of those instructions are for the distribution maintainers. The second part is a one-time procedure of selecting "enroll-me.cer" from a list and then never doing it again. If you can select which partition you want to install your linux distro on, you can select which certificate to enroll.

Not sure what they're looking at?

[darkain]

So, I personally don't follow performance numbers too much these days, but I just went and did a comparison of this "new" system against my current desktop (most components are 4-5 years old inside)

Theirs:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

Mine:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

So, the thing barely tops my "ancient" (by today's standards) desktop computer for CPU performance. It has half the RAM (even my old 10" netbook has 8GB DDR3)

Really, I think I'll just label this article as another #Slashvertisement.

Re:Not sure what they're looking at?

[auzy]

Exactly this. They are also barely upgradable, you need to pay 5x more for a laptop with decent specs, and many have weird linux compatibility issues in Linux, whereas most desktop's just work (on my Asus for instance, the I need to send a kernel parameter so it doesn't think my wifi is turned off).

And, they will wear out faster, be less maintainable, etc. Lets revisit this story when laptops are modular.

12 in laptop != desktop

[ganjadude]

I love it, I really do. The specs on portables have come a long way from my first inspiron back in 2001. but plain and simple I dont ever see laptops competing with desktops. They both have their purposes. and they both excel at different things. A desktop should be powerful, have large/multiple screens. Sure the laptop is powerful enough now adays but you wont ever get the cooling you can with a desktop which limits what you can put in them.

So while approaching DT performance might be a proper analysis, i dont think laptops can replace desktops

Re:12 in laptop != desktop

[Kjella]

So while approaching DT performance might be a proper analysis, i dont think laptops can replace desktops

Not to be mean, but it already did. Far more people have a laptop and no desktop than the other way around. If you add tablets too they together have 80% of the market, desktops 20%. Apart from the performance, you can always hook up a laptop to a keyboard, mouse and external screen. And as for performance, it's probably equal to a 2005 desktop which is plenty for most people. Sure it won't replace my gaming rig or anyone else doing "serious" computing at home, but we're in a very tiny minority. Heck, I think that apart from the interface a smartphone has enough computing power for a lot of people. If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey 19% now use Intel, even among gamers it's not all hardcore.

MojoKid = hothardware.com

[Art3x]

Just like snydeq always posts links to InfoWorld, MojoKid always posts links to Hot Hardware.

I like the tablet/laptop two-in-one design

[DrJimbo]

Speaking of Slashvertisements, I'm running Linux on a Dell 11" 3147 two-in-one. I can use it as a small laptop machine and I can also use it for watching Netflix in the tablet configuration. Although the two-in-one is thicker and heavier than a tablet, it can be better than a tablet for watching videos because there are several configurations where the keyboard acts like a stand so you don't have to constantly hold it.

For me, it was $260 well spent (via the Dell outlet store). I'm pleased with the device even though the Linux support is merely adequate. No multi-touch for the touchscreen and I can't access the accelerometer. AFAIK, everything else works. I wrote little scripts to rotate the display and disable the keyboard and touchpad. I get over 5 hours of battery life while mostly watching videos. I like that the Linux desktop and/or virtual consoles are only a click or two away because I like to tinker. There are a bunch of hardware improvements that would be nice, starting with a lighted keyboard, but for the price, I'm not complaining.

IMO, if the price is decent you might as well buy a laptop with a touchscreen that folds all the way back. I think it is a good use of resources and it makes the device much more versatile. For me personally it is better than a separate tablet and laptop. I may never buy another laptop that doesn't convert to tablet mode.

Re:Wait a minute

[ihtoit]

oh?

Here's a few black swans for you.

I have a stack of Dell Latitude laptops ranging from a CP PII/233 (A REAL COMPUTER) up to an Inspiron 8200 P4/2.0 (A REAL COMPUTER), that all use the same batteries. The youngest battery I have for them that still holds charge, is marked with an incept date of March 2006. The oldest battery I have is marked incept November 1999. It charges to 26% of nominal capacity and runs the CP for about twenty minutes. Replacements cost £36 a pop (in 2006) for the 4400mAh packs - from Dell.

My Asus EeePC 1008HA (A REAL COMPUTER) is four years old (purchased May 2011). The battery charges to 53% nominal and I get six hours out of that watching video. Replacement would cost about £35 - from Asus. But I'm not in a rush for that as I get to watch a couple movies on the train to Scotland without having to plug in.

My Toshiba (A REAL COMPUTER) is about the same age as the Asus (A REAL COMPUTER) (purchased March 2011). Battery is good for about three to four hours, don't know what it charges to - probably about 60% even though I totally abuse it. Replacement? No idea.

I can get practically any laptop keyboard for less than £50. They are necessarily built ot a much higher quality than desktop keyboards because for one thing they form part of the structure. A DECENT wireless keyboard (eg a Dell Bluetooth MM) costs about the same. You want to go cheap? Go nuts, tell me how long your £4 piece of shit Xenta or Kensington lasts.

FWIW I not only fixed computers on a daily basis from 2002-2008, I designed and built them as well. Even after retirement I still found myself designing, specifying orders and building the things. It's as much as thing as breathing once you've been touched by it, is PC design.

These stories are always non-sensical

[Sycraft-fu]

Yes, laptops, even smartphones, are always "approaching desktop performance"... for some older definition of desktop performance. Same shit is true even of super computers. The original super computer, the Cray 1, pulled about 80 Mflops of performance. Most high end smartphones these days pull in the realm of 500+ Mflops. So they are more powerful than a supercomputer!!!! ... well than a super computer from the 70s.

Same deal with this laptop and desktops. Yes even small laptops compete with desktops of a few years ago. However that isn't what desktops of today are like. Those are moving targets as well and they've gotten much faster. How useful that is you can argue and can vary person to person, but trying to act like these small laptops are anywhere near them is silly. You can get desktops today with 8 cores, 64GB of RAM, and multiple large video cards if you wish. No ultralight is coming anywhere near that. Now in 5-10 years? They may well be there... and desktops will be somewhere else.

Desktops will always be more powerful simply because they have a higher electrical and thermal budget. Sticking a 90-150 watt CPU and 200+ watt GPU in a desktop is no big deal. Trying to stick that in a laptop is a recipe for disaster.