Intel talks mobile toys
CeBIT 2008 Test your naming skills
INTEL GAVE an update on the state of mobile devices the other day, and there were a lot of goodies in there among the slides.
The most obvious one was the new logo for Montevina based notebooks, it is called Centrino 2. For the terminally clueless, it replaces Centrino and the border is now reddish instead of blue. Be still my beating heart.
Montevina is old news now, but there are a few new things coming with the platform. There will be 25W TDP CPUs for thin and light platforms, nothing horribly shocking there. There will also be 'Extreme' CPUs based on Penryn as well, again, no news there.
What is new is the performance tuning utility, think AMDs Overdrive tool with a blue logo, a lot less features and the name Extreme Tuning Utility. Not that it is a bad thing, it is just a shameless copy, but this one works with laptops as well. Yay.
The next thing up is a new term, the Netbook. This encompasses small cheap laptops like the Asus Eee. Think not a full Windows box, thankfully, but not a phone level browser either. I am not sure I like the term, so let's open it up to readers, what do you think this category should be called?
Silverthorne wafer
Moving on to the really mobile, things got more exciting. Silverthorne clearly heralds a new class of devices, small, powerful and cheapish. You know about the chip and the branding, so what is left? How about platform restrictions?
To get the branding of Centrino Atom, things based on Menlow need to have a 6 " or smaller screen and be 7.5" or smaller devices. Thickness for the devices can not exceed 1.02" either. Atom sans Centrino can be bigger.
Moorestown block diagram.
Speaking of Moorestown, it will be much more of a SoC. As you can see from the above pic, it packs a lot in to a small space. There will be variants for each market, but how much and what changes is very customer dependent. If you are big enough, you can probably get more tweaked for you. µ
Comments
Name for the Netbook
How about :"badly crippled, really cheesey, partially broken , notebook computer". Another bad idea to bridge the gap between notebook/laptop portable computers and PDA's. Usually these devices cost too much for the utility they provide. One also ends up having to cart around a PDA, smartphone (sic), several in between gadgets and a laptop. All this does is add complexity, bulk and more"stuff" too keep track of so that it is not lost or stolen. Someone needs to develop a reasonably-priced (not over-priced) crossover device that really has some genuine utility - part of that utility would exist in being able to replace several other gadgets at once. Maybe something modular. Sheesh
Netbook meh
Yes, can't see myself wanting a crippled computer. If I've got a phone that can read Excel spreadsheets and browse the internet in full technicolour, why again would I want a larger device that does... the same? Oh, it might run Flash and Java applets too, but really slowly. OMG...Now if they managed to get a full Windows XP device into that form factor, that would be interesting (or full Mac OS, Ubuntu, whatever your preference). The strong point of a laptop PC is flexibility/configurability and compatibility with your other stuff. In order to do this it must have a PROPER PC OS, not some weird Symbian or hobbled variant of Linux.
Netbook?
Maybe they should have typed "Netbook" into Google before suggesting it. They would have found that Psion has already built such a device with that name. Really rather good it is too, I sometimes still use mine.hey guys dont be retards
there are lots of people that will buy this and they are for sure going to be sold in emerging markets. just because they dont meet the standard in your economic reality doesnt make it a bad idea. go ahead and buy the normal nehalem procs for 10x the price you morons