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The Future of Netbooks

When will the netbook grow into a proper PC? It's not the lack of processing power per se.

 

Have you had this happen to you? You're deep in conversation with somebody and they counter and point you've made with an annoying factoid they have just googled mid-conversation. Did you want to hit them upside the head with the netbook that made that possible?

 

Googling during a discussion is one of few negatives that netbooks have brought to the world and the market has exploded over the last year. Mobile phone companies love them and they currently account for over a quarter of the total portable market. But there is a catch. When you start to throw more serious tasks at them, such as playing videos and online games, it becomes clear that what you have is not a fully-capable PC. It does not, in business parlance: ‘provide a rich PC experience'.

 

Why not? We can live without an optical drive and even the smaller keyboards and screens are acceptable, but not being able to transcode video in a flash? Come on guys. Why can't a netbook do all we might expect of a full-blown PC? It's got the processing power surely? Well there's a little more to it than that, however, steps are at hand.

 

Whizz for Atoms

 

Intel grabbed the netbook market by the danglies with its Atom processor. The Atom was designed with low power consumption in mind right from the start and does a good job of it. It currently comes in single and dual core flavors running up to 2.0 GHz with a single core and a heady l.6GHz with two little hearts. The single core version supplies the processing power equal to a Pentium M class running at about half the speed.

 

However, rather than a chip's raw power, netbook manufacturers are more interested in the bang per watt, or more specifically the watts required to complete a task and get back to idle again. Everything has to be achieved within acceptable power consumption to keep battery life this side of woeful. The Atom dual-core consumes twice the power on full tilt, but, of course, you don't get twice the firepower. You can argue about the validity of certain benchmarks, but you need software that can use two cores effectively to see a decent gain, a lot of the time you'll be hard put to tell the difference when doing typical netbooky things.

 

The Atom's weak spot has always been the chipsets around it, which are often modifications rather than new designs and consume far more power than the Atom. This is where Intel has been concentrating its efforts recently, especially on the graphics side of things.

 

Pineview is the result, and is Intel's next gen Atom, armed with the Lincroft micro-architecture. The big change is that Intel has squished the graphics and memory controller onto the chip, reducing the core chips from three to two (dumping the I/O hub) with the attendant reductions in power consumption. Intel says it'll be faster, use less power, produce less heat and use faster memory. Certainly a good start.

 

We want Videos

 

How good the graphics part of Pineview is will be of real interest, but it's basically the same as that found in the current Atom based netbooks: the GMA950 cranked from 133MHz to 200MHz.

 

Earlier last year Intel unveiled the chipset along with the ever-so-fly-faster N280 Atom. At last Intel has something better than the GMA950-based systems. You can sit down and watch a 720p video on your netbook. Hang out the flags. It can also cope with 1080p, well sort of. It can play a broadband-delivered 1080p vid, but cannot cope with the extra demands of blu-ray, so no logo. The problem here is Windows XP which only has DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0, rather than Vista's version 2.0.

 

Good news? Well you may have thought so, but it hasn't set the world on fire, in fact it has found few takers so far and its days are already numbered. The GN40 is scheduled to be phased out by the end of 2011 in favor of Pineview with its onboard chums. The poor old GN40 looks as if it has turned up to the party just as everyone else is caving for the next one.

 

Enter the NVIDIA Ion. This is a low-power graphics system designed for the Atom-powered class of machines and is based on the GeForce 9400M. This is a proper DirectX 10 compatible GPU with sixteen unified shaders, four rasterisation units and a pokey video accelerator. This is much more like it. The Ion can play proper Blu-ray films with 7.1 audio, use Google Earth without having a hissy fit, play games and deliver more of the bells and whistles you might expect from a standard PC. The Ion has been certified for Microsoft Vista, which means access to Vista's much improved DirectX Video Acceleration, although running Vista on netbooks isn't an ideal solution. There is a downside, the Ion is a little power-hungry at 12W though, which may prove to be a pain, but in the scheme of overall power consumption it's not insurmountable.

 

The Ion certainly looks to address the shortfalls of the netbook, NVIDIA's website even cheekily talks of ‘transforming traditional under-performing PC designs'. Ouch, take that Intel.

 

Interestingly, among the target form factors for the Ion, it doesn't list the netbook, although it's hard to see manufacturers resisting such a juicy chip (it absolutely slaughters the Intel 945GC and then dances on its grave in the benchmarks). We can expect the first Ion-powered machines this summer. Later on, the Ion promises it'll be teamed-up with VIA's new Nano processor and free NVIDIA's customers from relying on a supply of Atoms from the friendly people at Intel (I am not suggesting anything here).

 

Little Windows

 

Despite the famously clumsy footprint of Windows it has managed to capture over 90% of the netbook market. That's quite a feat for an OS that eats resources like a hippopotamus at a salad bar. Netbooks favor Windows XP. This must really annoy Microsoft, because its got the newer all-singing all-dancing Vista and lots of netbooks are being sold without it. Vista flopped on the netbook because it really struggles to perform properly. Which is a pity because the graphics sub-systems could really do with Vista's support.

 

Enter Windows 7. Microsoft has made sure that this will run on netbooks effectively (like it had a choice) and manufacturers are expected to jump straight from XP to Windows 7. Microsoft is preparing Windows 7 Starter Edition, a cheaper version especially for the netbook. How exactly it will be 'optimized' for netbooks remains unclear. It was going to be limited to only running three apps at once. Now rumor has it that Microsoft are to drop the limit and cook-up some other way of customizing it.

 

In the End

 

So, the forthcoming punch-up at the flashy end of the netbook market looks to be between NVIDIA Ion, VIA's Nano and Pineview systems on the playing fields of Windows 7. Intel and Microsoft will still occupy the best seats. Now is Intel really going to withdraw the GN40 and leave flashy top-end netbooks with NVIDIA stickers on them? Pineview is unlikely to be the top performer and Intel does very much like to be at the top of any market. Me thinks something will be announced...

 

What is for sure is that the next generation of machines will be closer to what we really expect from a PC, which is to be able to do nearly everything of course.

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