NetbookTech

Missed this one last week but the Moblin steering committee released Moblin v.2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettop systems. Features in the latest release of Moblin include the following (courtesy of the Moblin.org website here):

• New Internet browser which “far exceeds” the previous browser performance and adds plug-in support and add-ons
• 3G data support using Ericsson MBM 3G modems
• Moblin Application Installer is integrated. Application selection comes from the Moblin Garage
• Clutter 1.0 animation framework
• Bluetooth device support. Device discovery and pairing is now supported via a new panel in the toolbar. Moblin now supports Bluetooth audio devices, input devices, OBEX file transfer, and using a Bluetooth  phone as a 3G modem
• New version of ConnMan which now supports Ethernet, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and 3G
• Support for nettop systems
• Improvements to Instant Messaging
• Input method support now included across the system
• Localized in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional
• Includes updated versions of key technology components including Linux kernel version 2.6.31, Intel Linux graphics driver 2.9, X server 1.6.4, and Mesa 7.6.

If you’re curious about one person’s experience in getting Moblin 2.1 up and running on a netbook, head over to the Intel Atom Developer Program and check out Gina Bovara’s posting on installing Moblin 2.1 on an ASUS Eee PC 1005HA netbook.  Here’s a quick blurb from that posting:

“I have entered the world of Moblin with my Asus Eee 1005HA netbook, and I am loving it so far! I’ve been move productive on the go this week and I am having a lot of fun doing it!”

We tried out Moblin 2.0 beta when it was first released earlier this year. While it was certainly promising, it was still a bit too raw and buggy for our liking. We’ll have to give 2.1 a spin and see how this version fares!

You can download the images by going to this link over at the Moblin.org website.

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News.com reports that Intel is planning to accelerate the development of the Intel Atom processor. According to Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president, the Atom processor will be updated more frequently – following a strategy similar to the “tick-tock” methodology used for Intel’s Core processor lineup.

Not familiar with “tick-tock” advancement process? It works like this. One year (tick cycle) Intel delivers a new manufacturing process for the current processor architecture. The following year (tock cycle), the company introduces new processor micro-architecture.

So why the acceleration?

Intel’s always walked a fine line with the Atom processor. The chip’s superb energy efficiency and good enough performance catapulted the processor to a dominant market share of the explosive netbook market. Yet the very same netbook market has proven to be a double-edged sword for Intel. Higher sales of netbook systems have resulted in lower sales for the rest of the mobile computing market – translating to lower demand for Intel’s higher gross margin mobile processors as more lower-margin Atom processors are sold. Not a good thing for Intel. 

As a result, Intel tried to downplay the Atom processor – making sure to relegate and market the processor as just powerful enough for “basic computing” and small mobile devices like smartphones, MIDs, etc. In addition, the company has been reticent to introduce advancements to the processor line. In the last two years, we’ve seen only a dual core desktop version and a bump up in speed with the Atom N280 processor (from 1.6GHz to 1.66GHz – yawn).

In the meantime, recognizing that consumer interest in mobile systems has shifted to inexpensive thin and light systems, Intel saw a need to accelerate development of consumer oriented “ultra-low voltage processors” of the Celeron and Core 2 processor lineups. The end result? New thin and light notebooks that were more powerful than netbooks while also commanding a slightly higher price point (while certainly lower than inexpensive ultra-light notebooks which run faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors).

A good containment plan for Intel right?

Unfortunately all the success the Atom processor has witnessed has resulted in competing chip manufacturers looking for a way to get into the market. This year alone we’ve seen new processors/plaforms from all the major players including AMD’s Neo processor, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, ARM’s Cortex processor, and new VIA reference platforms built around C7-M and Nano processors – all in an effort to get a slice of the overall inexpensive mobile market. The message was clear to Intel – if they weren’t willing to improve the performance of low-end energy efficient processors, then the competition surely will.

As a result – we’re seeing a change in strategy for Intel. If the company wants to maintain its lead in all market segments – including the low-cost energy efficient netbook/MID market, then it needs to increase development of the Atom architecture. In the foreseeable future, we should see faster Atom processors as well as the upcoming Pine-trail architecture which integrates the GPU with the CPU.

What does this all mean to the consumer? More choices, faster systems, better battery life, and hopefully more inexpensive systems on the horizon. Good stuff!

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IDC is out with the first quarter 2009 worldwide PC processor shipment numbers and the news is both good and bad for the industry as a whole. First the bad news – PC processor shipments fell “significantly” for the 2nd quarter in a row – even when you take into account the normal seasonal drop in processor shipments for this time of the year. Yet despite the gloomy numbers, IDC believes the market decline is indeed slowing. Oh yes.. and that’s the good news.

Now onto numbers. IDC reports that overall worldwide PC processor shipments dropped –10.9% from Q4 of 2008 to Q1 of 2009. That’s not as bad as the previous quarterly drop (which was –17% from Q3 of ‘08 to Q4 of ‘08) but still not very pretty at all.

Now the relevant statistic to readers of NetbookTech has to do with Intel Atom processor shipment numbers. According to IDC, Intel shipments of the Atom processor declined –33% in Q1 2009 when compared to Q4 of 2008. Even more interesting is the fact that IDC estimates Atom processor shipments to constitute roughly 21 percent of Intel’s overall mobile PC processor shipments for the 1st quarter of this year. Yet despite this, the Atom processor makes up roughly 6.5 percent of overall mobile PC processor revenues during the same period of time.

What does this mean for Intel? The Atom processor might very well be cannibalizing higher end mobile processor sales which could end up eating away the bottom line for Intel.

Another side effect of slowing Atom processor shipments? A possibly large inventory of Atom-based systems (netbooks/nettops) which could very well be a boon for consumers. Why? Vendors will eventually need to clear out this inventory which ultimately means sale prices for netbooks and nettops – all very good news for consumers.

Check out IDC’s press release for additional information on both Intel and AMD and the industry as a whole.

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Here’s an interesting (and somewhat flawed or mislabeled) benchmark test over at CNET’s Crave.com. The website pitted three systems against one another. An ASUS Eee PC 1000HE with an Intel Atom processor vs a Samsung NC20 with a VIA Nano processor vs. the new HP Pavilion dv2 with the AMD Athlon Neo processor. Their goal – to establish how the netbook/ultra-portable processors compare against one another – a “CPU showdown” of sorts.

Their result? Not surprisingly, confusing and inconclusive. The Atom processor faired well in their “multitasking test”, while the Nano faired well on the Apple iTunes encoding test and finally, the Neo faired best in their Jalbum test.

This “processor showdown” was unfortunately flawed to the bone and realistically mislabeled. It would have been somewhat better to call this a system showdown between three different netbook/ultra-portable families – one involving the Intel netbook platform, one with a VIA netbook platform, and one with the AMD Neo platform. Comparing these systems was like comparing a Granny Smith Apple to a Red Delicious Apple to a McIntosh Apple. They’re all Apples but they vary in size, shape, texture, taste, etc. 

Folks who benchmark for a living (anandtech.com, techreport.com etc) will often try and isolate processor performance from the rest of the system. This means when they’re comparing one version of a Core 2 Duo vs a new version of the processor- they try and keep everything else the same. Same motherboard; same RAM; same Hard Drive etc etc. The Crave review pitted three very different systems with different guts against one another. There was no real way to isolate processor performance from the rest of the system components.

Ah yes.. the art of benchmarking..

In any case, what I find most interesting about this test is the relative poor showing of the Athlon Neo processor – not so much what the Atom or Nano did.. Makes me wish I could have three different systems to compare against!

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Interesting news of the day – Intel and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) announced they’ve reached an MOU (memorandum of understanding) to bring the Atom processor platform to TSMC’s extensive technology platform including “processes, IP, libraries, and design flows.” With this new collaboration in place, Intel is attempting to broaden the reach of the Atom processor – especially in the area of mobile phones.

According to Dr. Rick Tsai, President and CEO of TSMC, “This MOU brings together the Intel Architecture and the TSMC technology platform. We expect this collaboration will help proliferate the Atom processor SoC and foster overall semiconductor growth. .. With this agreement, our technology platform extends beyond the two companies’ current collaboration to support future Intel embedded x86 products."”

While the Atom processor has been enormously popular in the netbook and mobile internet device space, the processor is still noticeably absent from the mobile phone/smartphone market – primarily due to the higher power constraints of the processor.

Thus the collaboration makes a great deal of sense for Intel which gains technology expertise and access to IP with TMSC (especially in the areas of system-on-chip design) as well as access to TMSC’s clients and respective markets.

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Several notebook manufacturers have revealed to DigiTimes that the next generation Intel Atom processor, code-named “Pineview”, will hit the market during the second half of this year. Pineview takes the memory controller and integrated graphics processor (the northbridge portion of a chipset) and integrates it with the Atom core  – resulting in a system-on-a-chip design.

Pineview will be available as part of the new “Pine Trail-M” platform which also comes with the new “Tiger Point” southbridge chip.

Integrating the northbridge components into the processor die results in a surface area reduction of up to 60% translating to reduced costs for both Intel and for the end users, and lower heat dissipation. Lower heat dissipation translates into little to no use of fans, which translates to quieter systems and increased battery life. DigiTimes reports that the maximum TDP will drop from 8W to 7W while the average power consumption will be around 2W.

Pineview will also likely be available at higher clock speeds than the current crop of Atom processors. However, don’t expect amazing bumps in speed. Intel needs to maintain differentiation between all the different processors in its product portfolio. Other expected enhancements include a bump up in the front side bus speed to 667MHz, GPU core frequencies increased to 200MHz and the use of DDR2 667MHz memory.

[Check it out via Internet News]

Are the days of crappy netbook graphics performance coming to an end? The answer to that might finally be YES. NVIDIA announced the new Ion platform which couples the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GPU with an Intel Atom processor resulting in a system that is actually capable of offering a decent “visual experience.”

There are several use case scenarios for such a system – and of course the one that concerns all of us the most is the netbook scenario. While NVIDIA has yet to demo a netbook utilizing the entire Ion platform, they did say on their website that an Ion based system would:

• Deliver 10x faster graphics and video transcoding
• Full HD video decode and display
• 1/2 the size yet the same battery life
• Be ready for Windows Vista Premium AND Windows 7

Of course the Ion platform is  ideal for other target markets such as Notebooks, Nettops, and all-in-one systems – yet the real issue here is the netbook market which  clearly is booming during a time when nothing else seems to be booming.

If the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 can make its way into future generation netbooks without an increase in cost to the consumer, then this is a clear winner to all of us. As Darren Gladstone of PC World notes, “why stick to low expectations?” when it comes to netbooks. Shouldn’t we be demanding higher performance from systems that cost on average $400 dollars? I couldn’t agree more and let’s hope NVIDIA fulfills that promise.

Make sure to read the PC World article for even more info on Ion and the GeForce 9400 GPU.

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It looks like the upcoming HP Vivienne Tam Edition notebook might actually be a full fledged netbook system instead. According to the Tech Chic Glam webpage, the upcoming Vivienne Tam Edition system will be available in December and feature an Intel Atom processor. Yes.. the mere fact that the Atom is in there leads most of us to believe this is in fact a new HP netbook system.  The system was actually announced by HP back in September via this press release. However at the time, it wasn’t revealed that the system would feature the Atom processor inside.

According to the press release:

“The top of the notebook is gleaming red and bursting with peony flowers. The peony design is meticulously carried inside the notebook, under the keypad. The notebook also features a complementary embroidered storage sleeve that helps keep the exterior protected while being carried as a clutch.

The peony design features a unique blend of Asian and Western cultures, antiquity and modern style, technology and fashion. It was inspired by Tam’s “China Chic” style, which is recognized from the runways in Milan to the Olympics in Beijing and represents her personal mantra to live well and be beautiful.”

HP has an interview with Vivienne Tam here on their website where you’ll also be able to quickly glance at the netbook (and I do mean quickly!).

HP has yet to release the exact specs of the netbook but it’s probably safe to say that the system features a 10 inch screen and will have similar specs to other netbooks out on the market. At least we now know HP has switched to the Atom processor.

[Check it out via CrunchGear]

Did you know that Intel now owns the domain name “netbook.com” ? If you go to the URL, you’ll get redirected to a page entitled “Wireless Internet Laptop with Intel Atom Processor” (though a portion of the redirects do lead you to just intel.com as of this writing). Obtaining the rights to netbook.com makes a great deal of sense for Intel. It’s a simple marketing tactic – associating netbooks to the Intel Atom processor – thus making sure the two terms are synonymous with one another.

Many in the media suspect that Intel will turn this domain into a netbook portal of sorts. I tend to disagree – I think you’ll see the company continue to use the domain as a way to spread the message that netbooks are small wireless laptops running an Intel processor (preferably the Atom) inside. Just look at the current “overview” section on the front page. There are three key features listed and all of them mention the Intel Atom processor. It’s Intel quietly saying:

“netbooks == Intel Atom processors inside”

Now granted, Intel has every right to market all they want with the domain since.. well they own the domain, but I hope over time, the company will also use the site to educate consumers on different topics – such as:

• What makes a netbook different from a low end notebook
• What operating systems can be used on a netbook effectively
• Show how a user can be productive on any netbook no matter what OS is installed

It remains to be seen if customers will receive anything other than Intel propaganda over time..

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