Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Samsung's NC20 Netbook shows that Via Technologies' Nano processor can keep up with the Joneses. But will Nvidia be given the chance?

CNET Reviews' Dan Ackerman reviewed the new Samsung NC20 Netbook and found it not wanting in a matchup with the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, packing Intel's latest and greatest Atom N280.

Samsung NC20 Netbook packs a Via Nano processor--not an Intel Atom.

(Credit: CNET Reviews)

Though Nano is a necessary industry antidote to Intel's grip on the Netbook market, in the scheme of market share numbers, Via's chip is a blip at best.

I find it almost amusing when Intel lists Via as one of two competitors (Advanced Micro Devices being the other) in its Form 10-K filings. It's a fair analogy to say it's like a mom-and-pop coffee shop among a dense cluster of Starbucks stores. You may draw a few customers but 99 percent of the market is going to go to Starbucks.

Via helped pioneer the Netbook market in early 2008 by powering one of the earliest high-profile products, the Hewlett-Packard 2133 Mini-Note. In fact, Via was already supplying the inexpensive, low-power Via C7M--Nano's predecessor--in 2005 when the Atom concept was just a glimmer in Intel's eye.

The Netbook market vacuum didn't last long, however. Within months of Atom's arrival, the Via C7M was squashed by the Intel juggernaut, not to rise again. (Largely due to the fact that the C7M was slow, as one reader points out.)

The sober reality is that Via faces the same daunting challenge that Nvidia does: competing with Intel. The largest Netbook vendors--Asus and Acer--are wedded to Intel processors and chipsets, as are most of the other major players. An incremental increase in processor performance from Via won't necessarily tempt PC makers to drop Atom.

Nvidia's predicament is even more difficult because the GPU supplier can offer something that Intel can't: great graphics performance in a Netbook.

Nvidia faces a Catch 22. It needs a lot of Netbook design wins to make decent profit margins but customers won't sign up for Nvidia's Ion in the face of Intel's bundling incentives.

Alas, Nvidia's Ion seems destined only for tiny desktops for now. Nvidia has been shopping its Ion platform (Atom + Nvidia 9400M graphics) around and has had some success with top-tier PC companies looking to design diminutive desktops. But not any success to date in the Netbook space (although some smaller Asia-based Netbook makers are expected to announce Ion-based Netbooks at Computex in June).

Then there's Tegra. This Nvidia chip platform may have more success in the category of so-called "$99" Netbooks that are more akin--in the way they are offered to customers--to cell phones than laptops. These Netbooks, as depicted by Qualcomm, would be always-on and not part of the WinTel (Windows-Intel) ecosystem.

Nvidia went out of its way this week to demonstrate a concept device at CTIA in Las Vegas running Windows CE. Nvidia basically tore out the guts of an Intel-based HP Mini 1000 Netbook and replaced it with Tegra parts, according to a Nvidia spokesman Derek Perez, who attended CTIA this week.

A little more than a year after the launch of the MacBook Air, a new luxury laptop has arrived from Dell. This calls for another look at the notebook versus Netbook argument, the computer equivalent of bourgeoisie versus proletariat. In this case, Air versus Aspire; Adamo versus Eee.

Lightweight luxury laptops have been around for a while (think Sony Vaio and Toshiba Portege ultraportables), but the age of head-turning, ultrathin designs dawned with the 13-inch light-and-wide MacBook Air, the HP Voodoo Envy 133, and the ThinkPad X300.

Dell Adamo luxury laptop joins the MacBook Air in the conspicuous consumption computing category

(Credit: Dell)

Now the Dell Adamo joins the stable of conspicuously consumed luxury laptops. The Adamo soars along with Apple's Air in the rarefied pricing altitudes of $1,799 to $2,699.

At the other extreme are Asus and Acer, down-to-earth working-class designs which offer portability for a lot less. Though both companies offer expensive laptops too, they have gained prominence with their inexpensive Netbooks: the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. These typically fall into the sub-$500 range.

Dell's entry into the luxury laptop market was replete with all the trappings of a high-end product rollout, including a lavish, overdone Adamo Web site (as in, I couldn't click on "skip intro" fast enough) of beautiful people clutching computers. (And viewing the site, this question comes to mind: Is the Adamo meant more as a Dell showcase item--like a piece of finery set in a vitrine, to be admired but not purchased?)

Juxtapose this with what's happening in the Netbook space: inconspicuous but slow-but-steady creep into a higher-performance bracket. This trend is being driven by better Intel graphics (the GN40 is now capable of 720p HD video), with some Netbook designers entertaining the idea of adding even higher-performance Nvidia graphics. Reports also claim the Atom processor will be ratcheted up to 2.0GHz.

Will one design philosophy eventually prevail? Gravitating to a sweet-spot somewhere in the middle?

Let's do a little comparison shopping.

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

Alienware 128GB SSD option adds $550 but on the Dell XPS M1530 this option adds only $450.

(Credit: Alienware)

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook 2530p with an Intel 80GB solid-state drive option and Dell this month announced the 2.2-pound Dell E4200 with a 128GB drive.

Dell E4200 ultraportable can be configured with 128GB SSD

(Credit: Dell Computer)

Dell also offers solid-state drives on more mainstream laptops such as the 15-inch XPS M1530 laptop. The SSD option on the M1530 is twice the capacity and half the price of drives offered to date: 128GB for $450. The first generation of solid-state drives in the MacBook Air, for example, added almost $1,000 to the cost for only 64GB of storage. Dell lists it as an "Ultra Performance" M1530 option.

Solid-state drives are almost synonymous with the new category of tiny laptops called netbooks. And the category continues to grow. Lenovo is the latest high-profile entry. Earlier this month the China-based company introduced the IdeaPad S10 with a 4GB solid-state drive option.

More notable is the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000 that comes with a 40GB solid-state drive and that's priced at just under $700.

HP VP Keith LeFebvre holds a new EliteBook 2530p ultraportable. The laptop comes with an Intel 80GB SSD. Larger 160GB drives from Intel are expected in the fourth quarter.

(Credit: Intel)

In the gaming space, solid-state drives are just beginning to be aggressively marketed as the ultimate high-performance storage option. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, Chris Saleski from Intel's Storage Technologies Group demonstrated an Intel 80GB X25M solid-state drive crushing 7,200-rpm, 500GB Seagate Barracuda drives in benchmarks. The single Intel drive hit 44,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second), while the Seagate array did under 550 IOPS.

If this benchmark holds up in the real world, solid-state drives could catch on at game PC makers like Falcon Northwest, which demonstrated its FragBoxes at the Intel forum also beating high-performance hard-disk drives.

Dell's Alienware game PC unit currently offers a 128GB solid-state option for $550 on its Area-51 M15x laptop. "Solid state drives are the best performance options Alienware offers hardcore gamers," Alienware said in a statement. "These drives offer them shorter load times and faster access rates that put them at a much higher level of performance than traditional hard drives."

Alienware currently offers up to a 256GB SSD in a "RAID 0" configuration.

The proliferation at Computex of ultra-small, inexpensive netbooks poses this pesky question: why are traditional ultra-compact laptops so expensive?

The Asus Eee PC 1000 debuted this week with a 10-inch screen, 40GB solid state drive, and Windows XP. Pricing has been rumored at between $600 and $700.

Features and size threaten to push the Eee PC 1000 netbook into a category traditionally referred to as subnotebooks--with one glaring difference: price.

Subnotebooks like the 11-inch Lenovo IdeaPad or Sony Vaio TZ series typically start at above $1,500 and go up from there, ranging up to $3,000.

HP mini-note and traditional ultra-portable notebooks: both ultra-compact designs, but big price gap

(Credit: HP)

But as netbooks inevitably add more features, analysts and industry insiders are beginning to wonder what will happen to the traditional laptop category. "(If) you add more (gigabytes) of storage and a bigger screen, I don't know what makes this any different than a normal laptop," said Avi Cohen, a managing partner at Avian Securities.

Cohen said the obvious downside is a slower Atom processor--compared with a mainstream Core 2 chip--but on the upside Atom has better battery life. "Arguably there's a category of consumers that don't need such high processing power. Or, at least, a different kind of processing power," Cohen said.

Maybe many more than computer makers realize. Industry sources familiar with Intel's netbook strategy also see a potential clash of categories eventually. "Of course, it's always been a concern, as (netbooks) gets more and more traction," said one source familiar with Intel's thinking on this topic.

And as netbooks add more features and creep up in price, Intel has to worry about the market confusion that may ensue. "Is a $700 laptop, even running Atom, a netbook?"--the source asked. That may be the question that laptop vendors and Intel will have to grapple with as the netbook category grows.

(An Intel company blog back in March described the netbook as a small laptop "designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. And they cost about $250, making Netbooks a potentially disruptive and high volume market segment.")

Of course, subnotebooks like the HP 2510p, Lenovo IdeaPad, and Sony Vaio TZ offer more features than today's netbooks: faster processors, more memory, bigger hard disk drives, and usually larger screens than a netbook like the HP Mini-Note.

But two forces may be working against this purported advantage: One, all of these features may be overkill for a lot of consumers who use traditional, pricey subnotebooks for only email and simple Web browsing. And, two, netbook makers may continue to expand their offerings to push them closer to subnotebooks while keeping the price low.

This is something that Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur, the Via Technologies subsidiary that designed the Isaiah processor, has said. "The one gigahertz (Isaiah) is plenty powerful enough to do lots of things," Henry said. Via is also targeting the low-cost netbook category--and has been for some time. Its C7 processor is currently used in the HP Mini-Note 2133.

"If this category continues like it is, at the end of the year you may have mega hard drive-based netbooks," said the source familiar with Intel's strategy. "Let's say someone comes out with a really nifty (design), it's got some extra features, a bigger screen, and a few extra bells and whistles. I don't think that's a netbook even if it's running an Atom processor."

What is it then? That's the $64,000 question.

If there was any doubt about the state of solid-state drives, Computex seems to be putting it to rest.

SanDisk, TDK, and Intel, among others, are announcing new solid-state drives while Asus is launching the Eee PC 1000 with a larger-capacity drive.

SanDisk pSSD solid-state drive

(Credit: SanDisk)

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are used increasingly instead of hard disk drives in small computers like the Asus Eee PC and devices like the Apple iPhone because SSDs use less power and are generally more rugged--due to the fact that they have no moving parts.

The Asus Eee PC 1000, for example, will be offered with SSDs up to 40GB in capacity, beating the 20GB SSD offered in the Eee PC 901.

With this market segment in mind, SanDisk introduced a line of solid-state drives that are designed for "netbooks"--a category of compact, low-cost notebook PCs best exemplified by the Eee PC.

The SanDisk "pSSD" (Parallel ATA solid state drive) is available in 4-, 8-, and 16-GB capacities. The device can achieve a "streaming read" speed of 39 megabytes per second and a streaming write (record) of 17MBps, according to SanDisk. These speeds compare favorably with the low-performance 1.8-inch hard disk drives used in small notebooks.

The pSSD solid-state drives are expected to be available starting in August when pricing will be announced.

TDK also launched new solid-state drives. The "HS1" series is a line of 1.8-inch solid-state drives with the Micro Serial-ATA (SATA) interface. The Micro SATA specification provides for a smaller connector for the high-speed SATA interface used widely in PCs today.

The HS1 series offers capacities of 16, 32, and 64 gigabytes, respectively. The product uses SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory. SLC-based solid-state drives are used widely, today but many SSD manufacturers are planning to move to more advanced multilevel cell (MLC) technology later this year.

Burst performance is 100MBps for reading data and 50MBps for writing data. These speeds compare favorably with 2.5-inch hard disk drives.

TDK's SSDs are now available for volume shipment at sample prices of about $1,900 for a 64GB model and about $1,400 for the 32GB model.

On Tuesday, Intel will introduce the Z-P230 Parallel ATA (PATA) series of solid-state drives. The Z-P230 "is a cost-effective storage solution designed to replace traditional hard disk drives in netbook and nettop systems, yet is four times smaller and lighter than a standard 1.8-inch hard disk drive," Intel said. The drives come in 4GB and 8GB capacities.

The Intel SSDs are being launched along with low-power Atom processors that include the N270 for netbooks and the 230 for low-cost desktops--what Intel calls nettops. The chips run at up to 1.6 GHz with an average power consumption of 2.5 watts.

Intel will also announce high-capacity solid-state drives in the second half of this year that have capacities of 80GB and 160GB.