What’s next in personal computing after netbooks? The answer, it seems, depends very much on what directions the makers of microprocessors are taking.
If you were to ask Intel – at its Research Day this week - the answer would be Mids (mobile internet devices). AMD said in a briefing it was “thin and light” or “ultrathin”, while Freescale came up with some interesting-looking “smartbook” concept machines (pictured) at this month’s Computex trade show in Taiwan.
Via is pushing cheaper “thin and light” notebooks for its Nano processor, while Nvidia’s Tegra processor is for machines hot on playing multimedia and displaying long battery life. Qualcomm also talks about “smartbooks” for its Snapdragon processor.
Intel sees several new markets for its energy-efficient Atom processor, including netbooks, Mids and embedded applications, such as in the automotive industry. It sees all these markets being unified by the Intel Architecture and this was clearly displayed at its Research Day as its “rockstar” boffins showed applications in cars, classrooms, the living room and the office.
The emphasis was on how different devices such as notebooks, Mids, set-top boxes and in-car systems could work together using Intel processors, and an office environment showed collaboration on different interfaces including a tabletop display similar to Microsoft’s Surface computer. More in the audioBoo below.
Intel Labs’ vision and slogan is “Carry Small, Live Large” and includes using wireless connectivity to locate and use nearby resources such as remote displays and storage devices.
Meanwhile, AMD has been briefing on its second-generation “ultrathins”. It does not have a competitive processor to compete with Intel in netbooks so it came up with this “thin and light” concept at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
The idea is that consumers are becoming dissatisfied with the limitations of netbooks and want something more powerful, but still light and affordable.
“We’ve blazed the trail for a whole new category,” Patrick Moorhead, a vice president in AMD’s Worldwide Marketing Group, told me.
“We saw there was a spot between these very expensive ultra portables like the Macbook Air and Dell Adamo and the netbooks. This market is taking off and even our competitor [Intel] has just acknowledged at Computex that it’s all about ultrathins.”
Two years ago at Computex, the buzz was about ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs), last year it was netbooks, this year it was ultrathins. “Thin is in,” he said.
AMD had just one design win – for an HP ultrathin – at the beginning of the year, but it says 11 manufacturers are bringing out 24 machines for the holiday season, using AMD dual-core rather than single-core processors and better graphics chips. Prices will be $600-$900.
That sounds impressive, but Qualcomm, Freescale and the other chipmakers are all touting forthcoming machines that show off the attributes of their processors and give another take on these mobile categories.
As Richard Waters points out in his analysis of these attempts to redefine personal computing, there may end up being a big winner out there, but there are certain to be some equally big losers.
