I received an interesting e-mail from a reader over the weekend. Dr. Katherine Gold, a lecturer with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan, had some questions related to Netbooks (or small notebooks), broadband Internet access, and physical computer security. After some discussion, Dr. Gold and I decided to see if some of you might be able to help answer her questions.
Here's the situation: Dr. Gold is setting up a research project to investigate the benefits of online support groups for low- income women in the Detroit area who have recently suffered the loss of a stillborn child.
Most women benefit from such services, but they tend to be less available to the poor for because they are less likely to have computers and Internet access. Also, these women often have other children to care for, jobs to hold down, and limited transportation options, so they may not be able to take full advantage of Internet access at public libraries or other facilities.
In Dr. Gold's experience, the greatest need for support often comes at night, when such facilities aren't open, anyway.
The bottom line here is that Dr. Gold wants to supply her participants with computers they can keep at home for the duration of the study, along with some kind of Internet connection.
There are several key challenges for this approach: cost, convenience, theft resistance, ease of use, maintenance, and so on.
Dr. Gold and I agree that a Netbook--the original concept of a Netbook, a machine no larger or more expensive than necessary to provide basic Internet access--would provide a good platform for this application. A properly selected and preconfigured system would provide the necessary functionality at minimum cost. A Netbook is both less attractive to burglars and easier to secure than a desktop PC with a separate display and keyboard.
The Acer Aspire One is a small but complete notebook computer.
(Credit: Acer)In fact, when Dr. Gold wrote to me originally, she had already identified what I think is probably the most appropriate off-the-shelf solution: the $99 special offer from Radio Shack for an Acer Aspire One with built-in wireless broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity.
The only drawback to this offer is that it requires a two-year commitment to a $60-per-month AT&T wireless data contract, which adds up to another $1,440 on top of that $99 retail price. That's a lot of money for a study like this, especially when it's scheduled to last only one year.
Dial-up access would be cheaper, but it would preclude testing the therapeutic value of high-bandwidth Internet services such as videoconferencing and would likely interfere with ordinary telephone usage, which makes it a nonstarter in many households.
Dr. Gold provided some statistics on the stillbirth problem: it's 10 = times more common than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), involved in 1 in 100 births in the Detroit area. As one might expect, stillbirth leads to much higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders compared to live birth, and these problems have significant social costs.
Stillbirth is three times more common among African- Americans in Detroit than among whites there, explaining the special value of extending Internet-based therapy to lower-income women.
I suggested that a corporate sponsor might be willing to help defray the costs of the hardware and Internet access, and that was one of the considerations that led us to this post. It seems to me that a study like this could help demonstrate that the value of small notebooks goes well beyond students, and the value of wireless broadband goes well beyond business travelers.
I'd also like to draw attention to something that's always been obvious to me: "rugged" is the corollary to "small."
Smaller notebooks are more likely to be carried around, particularly without the protection offered by a briefcase or backpack, so they ought to be more rugged as well. There are a lot of low-cost small notebooks out there, but there are few, if any, low-cost rugged models.
Ruggedness lends itself to theft resistance as well; the traditional Kensington security slot is less effective on a machine with a flimsy plastic case and a lightweight internal metal frame.
Another thing we'd like to hear about from you folks out there--have you had any experiences with Internet-based theft deterrence and recovery services such as Computrace LoJack for Laptops? Such a service could be a helpful addition to this study and similar applications.
Feel free to comment below, or write directly to me and Dr. Gold. (Addresses obfuscated a little to deter spam.)
I'll post updates as Dr. Gold's project moves along.
It's been a big week for small systems.
On May 29, VIA formally announced (here) its "Nano" family of low-power x86 processors. These chips will be especially valuable in small laptops, UMPCs, and so-called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).
Then on June 2, NVIDIA announced (here) its Tegra 600 family, which is also being marketed for MIDs. But Tegra is a very different animal. It's based on an ARM11 processor core, which can run Windows Mobile or Linux but not Windows XP or Vista.
VIA's Nano processor. The chip itself, the silver rectangle in the center, is about 7.7mm x 8.3mm.
(Credit: Courtesy of VIA Technologies, Inc.)VIA's Nano processors are based on a new microarchitecture that is a giant step beyond previous VIA products and not far behind that of competing parts from AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, in this business, third place isn't a good place to be. VIA's older processors sold in relatively small quantities for low prices. Fortunately, they were very small and thus economical to make and sell.
The new Nano family offers much higher performance, with clock speeds from 1.0 to 1.8 GHz... but it's difficult to know what these clock speeds mean by comparison with AMD's or Intel's, and VIA isn't telling us, at least not directly. In this white paper on the Nano family, VIA only compares the performance of the new chips to its older C7 series.
But VIA does publish some numbers, so I was able to make some comparisons.
Take, for example, the Nano L2100 at 1.8 GHz vs. AMD's 2005-vintage Turion 64 ML-34 at the same speed, as found in the famous Acer Ferrari 4000 (reviewed here by PC World). The single-core ML-34 was much faster despite the clock-speed parity:
| Worldbench 6 test | VIA Nano L2100 | AMD Turion 64 ML-34 | AMD advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows Media Encoder | 585 | 467 | 25% faster |
| Adobe Photoshop | 809 | 412 | 96% faster |
| Roxio VideoWave | 507 | 381 | 33% faster |
Of course, the ML-34 consumes much more power than VIA's processor; the ML-34 has a 35W TDP (thermal design power) specification, whereas the L2100 has a 25W TDP. The L2100 idles at a mere 500mW, but the ML-34 probably consumes at least ten times as much when idle.
To be fair, I'm not sure these are entirely fair comparisons, since VIA didn't publish the details of their system configuration. Also, VIA's performance position probably looks better on simple productivity applications, but I prefer to look at multimedia performance since that's what we usually find ourselves waiting on. It's been a while since we had to worry about out-typing our word processor...
I'm looking forward to seeing some good performance and power figures for Intel's Atom; I think the VIA chips will turn out to be effectively faster but run a little hotter. When I get more data, I'll post a comparison.
But considering that the Nano is generally 60% to 200% faster than the C7 and much more power-efficient than competing products from AMD and Intel, the new product family will likely improve VIA's market position significantly over the next year.
NVIDIA's Tegra, a high-integration processor for handheld gizmos such as mobile Internet devices.
(Credit: Courtesy NVIDIA Corporation)NVIDIA's Tegra, on the other hand, offers no compatibility with existing PC systems or software, and its performance isn't even in the same class. The Tegra 600 family's ARM11 processor core runs at a maximum speed of 800MHz and, because it's a much simpler design, it offers a fraction of the effective performance of VIA's Nano.
So how can it possibly compete with Nano in mobile Internet devices?
Well, one answer is that Tegra is meant to deliver a much more complete solution with much lower power consumption. Instead of being just a core on a chip, like the Nano family, the Tegra 600 and 650 consist of a CPU core, a GeForce GPU, special-purpose hardware for accelerating digital video decoding and camera functions, and a dual-display controller that supports HDMI, LCDs, CRTs, and NTSC/PAL video. All of that on a chip the size of a dime, as you can see in the photo.
But the real answer is that what NVIDIA means by "mobile Internet devices" is different than what Intel (which coined the phrase), AMD, and VIA mean by it.
What NVIDIA means is basically any device with a size somewhere between that of a smartphone and a laptop, which can be used to access the Internet. But this doesn't strike me as a very useful definition; it boils down to encompassing anything like a smartphone with a larger screen. It's one thing to claim the Tegra 600 family supports a "full Internet experience" as NVIDIA did in advance briefings last month, but with the wide variety of sophisticated Web 2.0 websites out there, it really takes a PC-compatible system to deliver that experience.
Now, there's no doubt that the Tegra 600 and 650 will enable fun and interesting gizmos for people who buy lots of gizmos. (And honestly, I'm exactly that kind of person.) But I believe most people are not going to be interested in them. Anything larger than a cellphone is too big to carry around all the time. Anything with a screen smaller than about 7" to 9" isn't big enough for comfortable web browsing and movie watching. Anything with a screen that large might as well be a full Windows-compatible system.
Now, over time, these segments will inevitably blur together. Moore's Law will let us squeeze more performance into handheld devices. Software technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight will allow more websites to work on simpler systems. Hardware like high-resolution LCDs and OLEDs and tiny projection displays will help solve size problems too.
But for now, I believe the Tegra 600 family is aimed at a market segment that isn't ready to develop, whereas VIA's Nano has a big market ready and waiting for it. The Nano won't sell as well as competing PC processors from AMD and Intel, but it should help raise awareness of VIA among PC buyers and encourage PC makers to keep pushing more functionality into smaller packages.
- prev
- 1
- next
