There might be a lot of companies stating that netbooks are just a fad, and that the whole thing will pass (Sony, Apple), but that isn’t stopping several chip companies from putting serious effort into improving the performance of these small netbooks. NVIDIA, AMD, and VIA are all hard at work at improving several aspects of netbook computing.
One of the most important weaknesses in all current netbooks is the lack of a decent graphics chip. Most netbooks are powered by Intel’s Atom, paired with Intel’s 945GSE. While this graphics chip is powerful enough to power the internal display, as well as to run Aero Glass and Compiz just fine, the chip starts to show its shortcomings as soon as you hook up an external display: you can’t power full HD (1080p) displays.
Thanks to NVIDIA, this is going to change. The company has paired its 9400M chip (also found in the MacBook, for instance) with Intel’s Atom, giving mobile platforms 1080p video decoding, dual-link DVI out, DirectX 10 graphics, CUDA, and OpenCL. Power consumption goes up slightly from 12W to 18W, but that’s still acceptable. This new platform is called Ion, and will be available in the first half of next year.
Last month, AMD announced its ultramobile Yukon platform, which has a Radeon GPU attached to it. This will deliver the same features as the 9400M/Atom combination, but it will draw more power because AMD doesn’t yet have something comparable to Atom. VIA isn’t sitting still either, as it has announced its Trinity platform, which has a VIA Nano processor combined with an S3 GPU. This also offers all the niceties, but power figures were not yet available, according to Ars.
A fad or not, us netbook owners are in for a serious bump in performance with all these new initiatives. In addition, it will give us something we haven’t seen yet in the netbook market: choice. At the moment, you can buy either an Intel Atom netbook, an Intel Atom netbook, or maybe, if you look hard enough, an Intel Atom netbook. Choice is very welcome.
Better graphics capabilities will be nice I’m sure but that’s perhaps not so important in this format. Laptop gaming has always been the poorer cousin of PC gaming, which is in turn the poorer cousin of console gaming and netbooks are at the weak end of laptops.
OK, maybe some people will want to drive a 1080p display with one of these. Certainly video playback is the key function people will want from a netbook video card.
The sort of advances that I think will make more of a difference in the sector this year are the arrival of dual core processors and bigger, faster SSDs.
I think we get bigger bank for the buck with faster SSDs rather than more powerful CPUs.
I thought these devices were IO bound already, speeding up the CPUs gives little benefits in that case.
What I really want to see is lower power for the support chips and battery life reaching near triple digits in hours.
Of-course, I say this as a person who want to take one on one week canoe trips.
Any chance we see one with solar cells built-in for recharging?
I think you’d be better off with a windup charger than solar cells, unless there’s some sort of super power-saving design break-through.
You know recently in some clubs they have people dancing generate their own power for the light from the floor…
though it’s probably a bad idea to jump on your laptop to recharge it
Maybe Panasonic should try it with the Toughbooks.
Heh, woops.
Edited 2008-12-20 07:28 UTC
Who needs bubble gum at all anyway ?
Haiku doesn’t need all this 😉
I’d rather have real SMP so I can switch cpus off to save power, or even add another one on a slot.
That is a good point. I never really played around with the BeOS kernel setting for number of CPUs running. I know the CPU runs cooler when it is in HALT STATE, but I don’t know how much power is saved.
As it is, I already wish I could lower the clock rate on my laptop further (it gives the options of 733MHz or 1.0 GHz).
Tunable number or CPUs and/or clock rates would be useful too.
I just don’t get why Intel has taken such a hard line stance against allowing the dual-core atoms to be used in OEM netbooks. If power is such a concern, figure out a way to hot-plug a core (maybe based on AC power) to extend battery life. But the extra computing power of a dual core will lead to smoother response and better performance, particularly under high demand tasks (such as encrypting/compressing/transferring files around). Why is it acceptable to waste 6W so my netbook, with a screen resolution well under 1920×1080, can decode 1080p videos? So I can watch a bluray on a 9″ screen? What would the bluray drive cost compared to the netbook itself? Why the hell would you even hook a $250 netbook to a $1000+ 30″ monitor? All these things boggle my mind, as they are simply IMPRACTICAL.
Netbooks are great – we keep a bunch of them around as mobile SSH terminals to our machines – but they’re great because of their battery life, simplicity, and mobility. They weren’t meant to be high performance machines and nVidia/Intel/VIA should respect that and FOCUS on LOWERING power while raising or maintaining existing performance. This generation of netbooks = smart engineering. The next generation = smart marketing. Sometimes better does not mean faster…if I want the performance of a laptop I’ll buy a bloody laptop!
Edited 2008-12-20 07:21 UTC
Netbooks don’t need a power boost, they need a software boost. The software experience is generally bumpy and unpolished for end users. Us technical folk more often than not install another OS instead!
Yeah!
And even then a lot of programs don’t play too well with the low res screen (setting dialogs of fixed size and such).
Has anyone tried loading Fedora 10 on one of these NetBooks?
Not Fedora 10, but I just bought an Acer Aspire one which runs Linpus Linux… basically this is a customized version of Fedora 8. And it works really well.
Most distro’s have their own seperate wiki-pages for netbooks, for example:
– http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc
– https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One
– http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_the_EeePC
– http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_the_Aspire_One
– http://wiki.eeeuser.com/mandriva_2008.1_eeepc_installation_howto
Edited 2008-12-21 14:07 UTC
Awesome thanks for the info!!!
why dont they put more effort in to making them fanless! i think there is a conspiracy here. fans make more noise over time. noisy computers are replaced. a fanless computer with ssd can last forever (almos)
Having used my netbook for a bit now, I can see some room for improvement.
However, based on the comments above, people are underestimating the best feature of netbooks: the battery life. I get 6 hours of use consistently with my 901 when WiFi is on, or 2 days of suspend, and that opens up so many new opportunities for using a computer. When you combine that with the 2.5 pound weight and the easy suspend, I don’t ever have to leave my computer behind or even turn it off. I can take it with me in less than 10 seconds, and I just plug it in when I get home. It feels like I got out of jail.
The coming improvements sound good, particularly the graphics. If you keep the battery life up this would make a great mobile media player – I already use it as such, but it can barely handle 720p output. 1080p output would make hooking it to people’s TVs more rewarding.
A faster SSD would be really helpful – I get IO freezes.
A faster or dual CPU would be irrelevant, and could be really bad if it reduced the battery life. My only CPU-bound situation is JavaScript in IE; switching to Chrome solved that better than any CPU upgrade could. You would get more bang for your buck by improving the graphics.
The amount of RAM you have matters a lot since you don’t get virtual memory with a SSD. You start to notice how much memory programs use again, and pick programs based on how efficient they are (bye bye, Firefox). More RAM would help, but only if the battery life doesn’t suffer.
My netbook was cheap enough that it is replaceable, so next year I will likely get a new one and sell my current one to a friend. As long as I can get the same or better battery life and the same form factor, with some improvements, I’m on the upgrade cycle again.
Ignoring Microsoft’s ludicrous “limits” on what max specs a NetBook can have to run XP, why can’t a NetBook have a 64-bit dual core mobile-class CPU like virtually all normal laptops do? And why not 2-4GB RAM too, since RAM is dirt cheap? Am I the only person who’d like CPU/RAM specs in a NetBook to be the same as a laptop, albeit in a smaller package?
CPU, RAM and SSD improvements in NetBooks in 2009 would be most welcome, plus some way to get a higher resolution (especially vertically) on 9″/10″ screens – 1024×600 that seems to be the norm is a bit painful. Until these things happen, I see little point in getting a NetBook yet.
You might want to take a look at refurbished “ultraportables” like the Thinkpad x-series. Right now, the gulf between current netbooks and ultraportables is pretty large – compare the cost/specs of any netbook with a Thinkpad x300 or the MacBook Air.
But ultraportables from one or two generations back seem to fill that gap nicely. E.g., judging from eBay, one can pick up a refurb Thinkpad x60 for $600-700 USD these days.
Nice suggestion but those x60s weigh the same as two netbooks and the x300 and Air are basically luxury netbooks, with a luxury price tag – twice as fast for four times the money. OK It’s probably closer to four times as fast for four times the money but still not a bargain.
The x60 is around 3lbs, while most netbooks seem to be around 2lbs. So it’s a bit closer to one and half times the weight of a typical netbook.
A fad or not, us netbook owners are in for a serious bump in performance with all these new initiatives.
Wonderful to hear that, since I am a netbook owner myself! 🙂
So when do we get screen resolution independence in software? 1080p on a netbook screen would be extremely useful if you didn’t have to worry about the size of your icons and text. Higher resolution should make things easier to read on your screen not less.
Gnome and KDE more-or-less have it. Even in Windows you can lie about your DPI to get bigger text. HTML+CSS breaks it all though. Solution – get Opera.
Hopefully with this new graphic capability we would be able to run games on the netbook
Those that want to run business apps on the netbook but found them underpowered might want to use a terminal server to stream the apps
http://www.aikotech.com/thinserver.htm
Like other posters, I can’t see graphics power being essential. Sure, playing games once in a while will be nice, but netbooks don’t have the right form factor for serious gaming anyway.
What I see more need for is longer battery life and higher screen resolution. 1024×640 is just too little, and I would like a netbook to work for most of a day without recharging. But as long as it can scroll through a PDF document without too much lag, I’ll be fine. Web-browsing is i/o limited anyway, so here CPU/graphics card power doesn’t matter much.
What I’d like is more screen lines. 800 would be nice.