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LAS VEGAS--If you haven't noticed, Toshiba doesn't offer a Netbook for the U.S. market.

Yes, that's right Toshiba--whose name is practically synonymous with laptops--is still undecided about committing to one of the hottest mobile PC markets in the U.S., according to Toshiba officials at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday.

The Japanese company did launch the NB100 Netbook in December, but it is not marketed in the U.S., according to a Toshiba representative, speaking at CES.

Toshiba NB100 Netbook is marketed in Latin America

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

This highlights the Netbook quandary some of the largest mobile computer markers are facing. Throw Sony into the we don't-offer-a-Netbook-either category. This week Sony launched the pricey Vaio Lifestyle PC that it is very careful to bill as the "world's lightest 8-inch notebook." It costs a cool $900--which does tend to disqualify it as Netbook since Netbooks are, by definition, inexpensive (typically under $400 and only occasionally venturing into $600 or $700 territory when, for example, a 3G Wireless Wide Area Network, or WWAN, option is added.)

Listening to a Toshiba representative at CES, the company seems genuinely perplexed by the Netbook category. Where is the real value-add? What if Netbooks begin eating into its notebook line?

On the latter point, Toshiba, like Sony and Apple, may also be worried about getting consumers hooked on low-cost laptops.

(Note: The Toshiba NB100 is marketed in Latin America, according to the representative.)

LAS VEGAS--Some notebooks and an un-Netbook are worth noting on the CES show floor Thursday.

From top to bottom: An Asus concept computer; the just-announced Asus S121 (officially not a Netbook) with an optional 512GB solid-state drive--yes, that's 512 gigabytes; HP's new Pavilion dv2 and dv3 powered by processors from Advanced Micro Devices, including its newest Neo silicon.

Asus was showing its fold/unfold concept at CES

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

The just-announced 12-inch Asus S121 is "not" technically a Netbook but uses an Atom processor and a massive 512GB solid-state drive--the largest yet in any device

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

HP Pavilion dv2 ultraportable (0.9 inches thick) uses AMD's new Neo silicon

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

HP 13-inch Pavilion dv3 uses the AMD Turion processor

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

Intel's fourth-quarter warning is not only bad news but bad timing. With the Consumer Electronics Show kicking off Thursday adorned by all those bright, shiny gadgets, Intel effectively said: gadgets maybe, but not so bright and shiny.

And for an Intel warning, this one was particularly dire. The biggest chip bellwether said it now expects only $8.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 23 percent drop from the year-earlier period, and 20 percent from the third quarter. And this comes after issuing a warning on November 12.

So what's happening? The clearest example of the gloom that has descended on the chip industry, and by extension computer and gadget makers, came relatively early from another chip bellwether, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company -- the largest chip contract manufacturer, which supplies chips to all the first-tier electronics and computer makers. Back on October 30, TSMC issued a forecast that set the tone for the rest of the industry: CEO Rick Tsai said the supply chain -- the myriad of companies that order chips from TSMC -- was "reducing inventory very aggressively."

That supply chain, either directly or indirectly, is the computer and gadget makers of the world.

So going into CES, the picture is not pretty. "We just heard consumer electronics sales over the holidays were down 26 percent year to year," said Broadpoint AmTech analyst Doug Freedman. "You want to head into CES with a pall over it? There it is, right there."

And go the other way, up the supply chain -- the chip gear makers who supply production equipment to chip companies -- and things are even more bleak, with some gear makers saying they don't expect any orders at all in 2009 for certain categories of equipment. In December, Netherlands-based ASML CEO Eric Meurice said that "never before have we witnessed such a sharp and sudden fall-off in lithography system demand."

Other examples are almost too numerous to list: for starters, Toshiba and SanDisk slashing flash memory output 30 percent, Taiwan's memory chip industry on the verge of collapse, and Micron Technology posting a massive $706 million loss.

Yes, there's probably a silver lining in all of this, in that chipmakers and gadget suppliers have to cut the fat and become lean and mean, but where does it end?

And how will this downturn transform the computer industry? Looking at it through the prism of Netbooks -- which are expected to catch much of the limelight at CES -- may provide some insight. These cheap laptop computers are on fire, partially because they are compelling designs but mostly because of price. Good thing? Yeah, great for consumers and small businesses that are finally realizing they don't have to pay $2,000 for a small, lightweight ultraportable notebook. Or simply can't afford a $1,000 notebook.

But not so great for Intel, Apple, and others. "What is the most expensive laptop out there? The Apple (MacBook) Air," said Freedman. "That's a $1,500 or $2,000 machine. Now all of a sudden I'm giving you ultraportability for $500," he said, referring to the price of a Netbook.

In this sense, over-priced notebooks could be seen as roughly equivalent to large SUVs -- overkill. Just as General Motors must wean itself off lumbering SUVs, so may Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Toshiba, et al., be forced, to some extent, to wean themselves off high-profit notebook computers. After all, what took Sony so long to bring out a Netbook? And why don't we see an Apple Netbook? It's not a stretch to say that those companies don't like the idea of selling a lot of inexpensive computers.

At CES, companies will be hawking flashy gadgets, as always, and maybe attendees can suspend disbelief for a few days blinded by the glare of the gadgets. But that's really just lipstick on a pig.

Advanced Micro Devices' manufacturing spinoff got an all-clear from the U.S. government on Tuesday.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), part of the U.S. Treasury Department, gave the green light to AMD and the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) to create The Foundry Company, the manufacturing operations that AMD spun off back in October.

CFIUS has also determined that "the proposed additional investment in AMD by Mubadala is not a covered transaction subject to CFIUS review," according to AMD.

ATIC will own 65.8 percent of The Foundry Company and AMD 34.2 percent, according to a revised statement from AMD in December.

ATIC is a technology investment company wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. The Foundry Company will be a U.S.-headquartered chip manufacturing company with manufacturing facilities in Dresden, Germany. Future plans call for manufacturing facilities in Saratoga County, New York.

Both SanDisk and Samsung announced solid-state drives on Tuesday--though that's where the similarity ends. SanDisk's SSDs are aimed at Netbooks, while Samsung's new SSDs are for the high-performance server market.

SanDisk Gen 2 pSSD drives for Netbooks are available in capacities up to 64GB

(Credit: SanDisk)

SanDisk is debuting its new 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB pSSD-P2 and pSSD-S2 solid-state drives at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Samsung's 100GB SS805 drive, on the other hand, is being introduced on Tuesday at the Storage Visions 2009 Conference, also in Las Vegas.

The second-generation SanDisk drives, designed as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives, use the Serial-ATA or SATA interface. First-generation drives were based on a slower Parallel-ATA or PATA interface.

New Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and the HP Mini 2140 use the SATA interface. (Many ultraportable notebooks, like the first-generation MacBook Air and HP Compaq 2510p, however, used the slower PATA interface.)

"Netbooks represent the fastest growing PC segment in 2009 and 2010 yet widespread adoption of SSDs in netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constraints," Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for solid-state drives at SanDisk, said in a statement. "With the significant improvements in performance, capacity and low pricing, these SSDs are a perfect fit for the exploding Netbook market."

SSDs are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at booting and launching applications, taking about half the time of an HDD, according to SanDisk.

SanDisk's drives, slated to be available in February, 2009, are built using the company's 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash memory. MLC technology generally yields lower-cost SSDs compared with more traditional Single-Level Cell or SLC technology. SanDisk manufactures the flash memory in Yokkaichi, Japan with its partner Toshiba.

SanDisk did not provide pricing information but said its 32GB modular SSD is "priced at parity" with 80GB 2.5-inch HDDs in OEM quantities. HDDs with this capacity range in price from about $50 to $100 (depending on speed) so this is rather vague pricing guidance.

Unlike SanDisk's consumer SSDs, Samsung's SSD is targeted at the very-high-end corporate enterprise market. Samsung uses more pricey (and faster) SLC technology since its drives are targeted as a replacement for the high-performance 15,000 rpm hard-disk drives that are the staple storage device of large corporations. These drives are typically used for applications such as video on demand, streaming media content delivery, internet data centers, virtualization, and on-line transaction processing.

Samsung claims its 100GB Enterprise SSD can process IOPS (input/output per second) more than 10 times faster than the fastest 15,000 rpm SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) HDD available for transactional data workloads.

The high-performance 2.5-inch enterprise drive reads data sequentially at 230 megabytes per second (MB/s) and writes sequentially at 180 MB/s, Samsung said. The 100GB SSD's performance is derived from an 8-channel controller, improved NAND flash and special drive firmware, all developed by Samsung.

The 2.5-inch drive will be available this quarter.

Samsung did not provide pricing information.

Updated at 11:05 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Another Netbook? No, not exactly. Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable, thank you. And the new Athlon Neo silicon inside from Advanced Micro Devices will try to prove that point.

AMD is introducing new chips at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that target the no-man's land between Netbooks and notebooks. Typically, these designs are referred to as ultraportables--the most salient examples being Apple's MacBook Air, the Toshiba Portege, and the Sony Vaio TT series.

So what makes AMD's platform different? In one word, price. Ultraportables fall into the boutique category of laptops: very stylish, very slim, very light--and very expensive. Usually ranging between $1,500 and $3,000. HP's notebook with Athlon Neo silicon cuts the price in half. The Pavilion dv2 will start at $699 and top out at $899 for standard configurations.

HP 12-inch Pavilion dv2 ultraportable starts at $699, at least half the price of traditional ultraportable notebooks like the MacBook Air, Toshiba Portege, and Sony Vaio TT series.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The dv2, at 3.8 pounds, is slightly heavier than ultraportables that typically weigh between 2.5 and 3 pounds. It is 0.9-inches thick, slightly thicker than more expensive ultraportables like the MacBook Air.

But the Pavilion dv2 will pack features such as an AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 separate (discrete) graphics chip, a relatively large hard disk drive (HP lists drives up to 500GB), and a 12.1-inch LED screen. Features that differentiate it from Netbooks and put it squarely into ultraportable territory.

AMD Athlon Neo silicon details

(Credit: AMD)

The dv2 will also come with WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) options as well as standard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Bahr Mahony, AMD's manager of mobile products, said in an interview that one of the few ultraportables available today with discrete graphics is the MacBook Air, but this starts at a whopping $1,800. (The Air uses Nvidia's GeForce 9400M graphics and Intel's Core 2 Duo low-voltage processors.)

The Athlon Neo platform can handle 1080p HD playback and a "casual" gaming experience with realistic 3D graphics, using the optional ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 graphics chip.

AMD's Athlon Neo processor--formerly code-named "Huron" under the platform codename "Yukon"--runs at 1.6GHz and has a power envelope of 15 watts, comparable to Intel ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) Core 2 Duo processors that power ultraportables today.

AMD's Neo does fall short in one respect, however. Currently it is only single-core, whereas Intel ULV processors are dual-core at a comparable power envelope, and, moreover, typically integrate 6MB level-2 cache memory to boost performance. AMD's Neo has only 512K of cache memory.

A dual-core chip, code-named "Conesus," will come in the second half of this year, according to AMD's Mahoney.

The first HP Pavilion dv2 ultrathin notebook is expected to be available from HP in the second quarter.

Freescale Semiconductor is expected to launch new silicon for Netbooks--devices that it believes will come in below $200--at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

The ARM chip architecture-based i.MX51 processor is designed to enable "low-power, gigahertz performance netbooks at sub-$200 price points," according to Freescale, formerly Motorola's chipmaking arm.

Freescale envisions sub-$200 Netbooks

(Credit: Freescale Semiconductor)

The definition of a Netbook seems to get redefined every month, as different companies push their distinct vision of the device. And Freescale is no different. While Freescale, like Intel, believes the Netbook is a companion device to the PC, it envisions devices that are more frugal with power consumption and run the Linux operating system. Intel-based Netbooks using the Atom processor typically offer better performance than ARM-based devices and run the Windows XP operating system.

"Because the primary function (of a Netbook) is accessing the Internet, Linux and Firefox are a good operating system and application for that purpose," Glen Burchers, director global marketing for Freescale's consumer products group, said in an interview.

He doesn't see ARM competing directly with Intel Atom processors, which target a higher-end Netbook segment. "ARM based processors can have a play, in addition to x86 (Intel)," Burchers said. 'We don't believe ARM processor will replace x86, but will augment them for a certain segment of the market." Ideally, the Freescale chip would be used in Netbooks that get about eight hours of battery life and sport an 8.9-inch screen.

And ABI Research, a market research firm, forecasts that there should be plenty of space for competing visions of the Netbook over the next several years. ABI expects consumers to purchase 60 million netbooks in 2013, compared with only 182,000 sold in 2007.

Freescale has been working with Pegatron, a wholly owned Asus subsidiary, to develop a reference design that features the 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based i.MX51 processor, Canonical's Ubuntu operating system, Adobe's Flash Player software, a new power management chip, and the SGTL5000 ultra low-power audio codec.

Freescale's netbook reference design is available now. The company says it is currently sampling the i.MX51 processor and MC13982 power management device to tier-one Netbook customers. Volume production for the i.MX51 device is planned for Q2 2009 to power netbooks designed for the 2009 holiday shopping season, Freescale said.

(Note about Apple Netbook speculation: Freescale says that the "speculation is inaccurate" that its i.MX51 chip will be used in an Apple Netbook, as some reports have stated. "Freescale's netbook approach is unambiguously an ARM/Linux play, and any suggestion otherwise is inaccurate," a Freescale spokesman said Sunday night.)

A couple of freelance writers for the blog VentureBeat say they have ported Google's Android operating system to an Asus Eee PC. But does this constitute a new trend in Netbooks?

Asus Eee PC: Android next?

(Credit: Asus)

Matthäus Krzykowski and Daniel Hartmann said in a post Thursday that they compiled, in four hours, the open-source Android operating system for an Asus Eee PC 1000H Netbook. The two run a start-up called Mobile-facts.

In somewhat breathless prose here's what the authors conclude about Android on Netbooks: "For (a) myriad of (Silicon Valley) software companies, it means a well-backed, open operating system that is open and ripe for exploitation for building upon. Now think of Chrome, Google's Web browser, and the richness it allows developers to build into the browser's relationship with the desktop--all of this could usher in a new wave of more sophisticated Web applications, cheaper and more dynamic to use."

If this was Verizon or Asus saying this, it would be product news. Otherwise, it remains an interesting experiment. The authors say Intel is one contributor working on the adoption of Android to a notebook, as a partner in Google's Open Handset Alliance.

Indeed, OHA does have a long list of illustrious members, many of them large companies (or entities) like China Mobile, Broadcom, LG, NTT DoCoMo, Nvidia, and Samsung.

Qualcomm is a member too. And, by the way, already has a prototype Netbook running Red Flag Linux on top of its Snapdragon processor. And it is worth noting that Qualcomm claims it has first-tier PC companies planning devices, including Acer, Asus, and Toshiba.

Would Qualcomm partners opt for the Android operating system instead? It is also worth noting that Qualcomm supplied the silicon guts for the T-Mobile G1, the first phone to run Google's Android operating system.

Global sales of chips sank 9.8 percent in November, underscoring the impact the worldwide economic crisis is having on chipmakers, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Friday.

The San Jose, Calif.-based trade group said worldwide sales of semiconductors fell in November to $20.8 billion, a decline of 9.8 percent from November 2007 when sales were $23.1 billion.

Sales were down 7.2 percent from the $22.4 billion in October, according to the SIA.

Memory chips are putting the biggest damper on growth. Excluding memory, there was a slower year-on-year decline of 4.8 percent to $17.3 billion from $18.2 billion, the SIA said. "The memory market, which has been under severe price pressure throughout the year, has seen sales decline significantly while many other product sectors have year-to-date sales above 2007 levels," SIA President George Scalise said in a statement.

Micron Technology, the largest U.S. maker of memory chips, posted a net loss of $706 million last month due to an oversupply of memory. And Taiwan's memory chip industry has been seeking rescue funds from the government because of deteriorating market conditions.

For the first 11 months of 2008, sales were $232.7 billion, a slight increase of 0.2 percent from the first 11 months of 2007 when sales were $232.2 billion. And excluding memory products, year-to-date sales jumped 5.6 percent.

"We expect the industry will remain the second largest exporter in the U.S. for 2008," Scalise added.