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About LinkBacksRead more.And gives AMD a pat on the back, too.
Read more.And gives AMD a pat on the back, too.
If these had been out a bit sooner I'd have certainly go for one of them over the bog standard atom + 945 but still, they do make sense for the lower end budgets as you say.
Over the two though I would be going AMD assuming it's price is competitive or it's every day performance was noticeably better than the Intel + 9400 (which I imagine it is..).
Bring on that HP dv2
This ^^Originally Posted by staffsMike
Bring on that HP dv2
Aren't these going to be obselete now that Intel are effectively doing a SoC? At the least, people will have to stump up the budget (both money and power wise) for components they don't use otherwise.
I can't help but feel that Jen-Hsun Huang is, deliberately or otherwise, missing the point.
He wants a netbook that has :-
- more powerful graphics
- costs more (because of above)
- bigger screen
- runs heavyweight applications better.
But hold on a sec, if you increase the screen size, you increase the case. If you then increase the cost and add powerful graphics, don't you risk driving up heat and driving down battery life? If you do all he wants don't you actually end up with, erm .... a laptop?
The whole point, at least for me, of a netbook is low weight, low (but enough) power, cool, long battery life and minimal cost. He mentions Adobe, EA and Microsoft. Personally, I don't want to play games (or not much beyond solitaire) on a netbook, and I certainly don't want to run Photoshop. I want to be able to do the kind of things I need on the move - I want WP, maybe a bit of Excel, I want to send/receive emails, browse the web, and so on. I do not need fancy graphics chips for that. Mostly, I want to be able to spend 7-10 hours on a plane using a good proportion of that time productively, without charging batteries every two hours, and I don't want to lug a chunky brick about to do it.
Either Jen-Hsun Huang is missing the point of netbooks, or I am. If he can increase graphics power without increasing weight, size or cost, or decreasing battery life, then great. Otherwise, leave netbooks alone, will you!
Good point Saracen, although I'm sure there will be a lot of people who disagree with you. With the introduction of more graphics power the line between what qualifies as a netbook and what is just a small laptop becomes yet more blurred.
A low cost, ultra-portable device that can output full 1080p would win fans though i'm sure... How close are we to that?
Exactly. the popularity of netbooks is because of what they are not, rather than what they are. They are not too big to take on holiday, not too expensive, and not too complicated.
Sadly, the general way companies differentiate their products is by adding features - so it has been a race to add more and more crap into netbook that no one will ever use.
Broad support for 3G is the only thing lacking from netbooks. You can keep your fancy graphics and your big hard drives and 10" screens.
I guess the clue is in the name *net*books. They're there for accessing the interwebs - and you hardly need fancy graphics for that.
I don't see it that way. Why do people want their netbooks to handle 1080p HD movie while the screen resolution is just 1024*600??? Even you can just carry it around with HD movies in your HD and plug it in some projectors but I don't really see the point.
It sounds to me like NVidia are trying to muscle in on Yukon territory, which is to say a potential untapped niche for people who *do* want a bit more for occasional gaming or HD movie playback, but *don't* want either a 15"+ screen or a price tag well over £500.
For example, I make quite a few lengthy train journeys for work. I want to take a laptop with me so I can get access to email / internet, and yes, a netbook would do that just fine. BUT: I also want to have some reasonable entertainment if I'm stuck on a train for over 2 hours - a light game or a movie. I might have urgent maintenance requests on work's websites crop up, so I may have to do some light image manipulations; or rewrite and test chunks of my .NET applications. I don't want to be lugging a 15"+ 3kg+ laptop all over some random UK city along with my paperwork plus potentially a set of clothes, if I'm having to stay overnight. And finally, work funding is very tight, so I'm far more likely to get money for a sub £500 notebook.
At the minute, there is next to nothing in the sub-15", sub-£500 marketspace except low power netbooks. If Yukon and Ion could come in between £350 and £500 with 12" - 13" screen sizes and a weight of around 2kg (and preferably sporting a battery life around 4 hours), that's a market that currently isn't serviced. It's not netbooks, sure, but it's not currently available in normal laptops. Whether it will get a name of it's own, or they'll just be "small laptops", remains to be seen. But if they do come, I'll be buying one
It might be that it would win fans, but it'd lose some existing ones too. People like me want netbook for what it is, which is compact, lightweight, good value and very good battery life. If you lose those, you lose the point of a netbook, in my opinion. If I want to carry something larger, more powerful, heavier and with more power to run mainstream apps, well that's why I have a laptop.
Will those markets converge? Maybe. But if we lose the reason for netbooks to exist, then I lose the reason to buy one.
nVidia just want to sell chipsets, and seem to think this is an opportunity. The obvious answer, I guess, is for someone to produce an nVidia-spec netbook and see how it sells. Maybe the market will go for it. But I wouldn't, because it'd defeat the point in me having one in the first place.
AMD's Neo technology to crush Atom, now that refreshing.
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