Netbooks Are Losing Steam?

[whabang]

Netbooks are losing sales because the market is slowly getting filled.

There is limited use for a small system which is incompatible with applications requiring 800x600 displays, decent 3d chips, or *gasp* performance.

The best selling products the last few years has been 13" to 16" notebooks with low-end discrete graphics chips (non Intel/Via) like the Geforce 8400M and 9600M. Those are actively becoming obsolete, and users are looking to replace them.

Netbooks, on the other hand, are still sold with 1.6 GHz Atoms, and five year-old 945 chipsets. While it is amazing that Intel has been marketing the same product for five years, even though it's video part was obsolete at release, it simply does not give any reason for upgrading.

Give me a netbook with good battery life, a decent i7 CPU, a video chip that can play modern video games at 1680x1050 resolution, AND a good looking docking station, then I will get one.

[whabang]

@KThunder

I think you misunderstood me. I was not making fun of netbooks; I was merely pointing out why sales are going down, which was the topic the last time I checked.

Unfortunately, many netbooks are sold with 1024*576 displays, giving problems with a lot of applications that refuse to run on lower resolutions than 1024*768 or 800*600.

@paolone

Why not? Is there some kind of limit on how powerful a computer may be before it can no longer be called a netbook?
The main features of a netbook is portability, battery life, and internet connectivity. Any computer sold for less than 300 USD, and being designed with that in mind could be classified as a netbook.

[whabang]

Actually, Intel is marketing the G945, as it was the only available platform for the Atom for quite some time. If they'd built the platform on the X3100 then the video performance would probably be better.

The GMA 950 has no hardware vertex shaders (tile-based rendering, und so weiter), but has slow but functional pixel shaders. The driver reports shader 2.0 compatibility, at least on my server, which admittedly runs old drivers, but anyway.

At the time of its' release, the GMA 950 had quite impressive performance for an integrated chip (look at my post history for my first impressions of it), and while it required a fast CPU, it was actually able to play most games, albeit on "low" settings.
The Atom CPU sacrificed performance for battery life, thus the 950, which by the time of the Atom's release was getting old, was crippled even further.

Regardless, the 950 has a low power usage, which justified its' use in the Atom platform. I just don't see why Intel hasn't tried to at least use the X3100 or the 4500 and developed a new platform. As I stated earlier, I am convinced that it is the lack of recent development is a main reason for the stagnation of the netbook market.

On a side note, Intel is working quite hard on improving the performance of their 3D-chips, and since they integrated the GPU's into the CPUs, they are actually beating low-end video cards like the nVidia 8400. With the rate they are improving the GPU performance, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel catches up sometime during the next five years. Considering that MS is trying to create a DirectX computing platform, it's not unthinkable.

[whabang]

RE: Any design they want

They can't produce an itanium. They can't produce a GPGPU. Really there is probably only a handful of engineers (spread across the big 3) who can make things go faster. Intel's graphics division seems to have Cyrix's philosophy, make em cheap, but fast enough at office programs.

Which is why they have a 40% market share on the video market.

Not developing/supporting an API for GPGPU operations does not make the chips incapable of handling those operations. Last time I checked, the recent Intel video solutions had programmable shaders and directX-capability; it's just as with the slow speed that those chips run with, combined with the fact that they do not have their own RAM, which makes them horribly unsuited for GP computing.

Oh, and Cyrix actually had the integer performance crown for a while in the 90's.