sweet netbook

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 06:50:11PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> The HP Journada series of the past was a bit like that and it didn't
> fly.  WinCE might have been a problem.

Well just look at the "smart phones".  The cell phone companies seem to
think windows CE devices are great.  The customers pretty much universally
hate windows CE devices.

> I like Linux but I don't know that it is an easy sell.  Lots of
> netbook manufacturers seem to have retreated from it.  Of course we
> think that they didn't do Linux right.

Well MS dropping the XP license cost to something like $30 per netbook
might have something to do with it.  After all most people are used to
running windows.

> Sadly, Intel and MS are scared of cannibalizing sales of their
> higher-price products and so, via licensing agreements, limit the
> capabilities of netbooks.

The 1GB ram limit is just pathetic.

> I don't understand this.  The ARM has been around for a while.  Ditto
> AMD low-power chips.  Yet the netbook came out with the Atom, more or
> less.

Well Asus started with a celeron M, before the atom even existed (although
intel was probably working on it already).

> The OLPC XO may or may not have been an inspiration for the netbook.
> It has an AMD CPU.

Yeah, the Geode LX is quite decent.  Not modern though by any means.

> I admit that the original Asus netbook had a ULV Pentium M.  I'm not
> sure why.

Because the atom did not yet exist.

> Intel was trying really hard to derail or turn the OLPC project.
> Maybe the Atom was part of that, but that seems insufficient
> justification.
> 
> Intel was a strong player in the ARM world (StrongARM, xscale).  Maybe
> when they ditched that they felt they had an exposed flank and built
> the Atom to cover it.

intel wants to control the market, and to some extent they control x86,
but they have no way to control ARM.  Just look at the graphics chips
intel is working on which are x86 based (original pentium design core)
but widely parallel.  They want everything to be x86 based and nothing
else.  No ARM, no PPC, no MIPS.  Just x86.

> The Atom was mentioned as being aimed at things like cell phones.  If
> so, its power budget makes it a failure.  But maybe that will improve.

Well intel seems to claim it should work in a cell phone.  I don't
think so.

> AMD and Via have had useful low power x86 processors for years.
> Something I don't know made netbooks crystalize around the Atom.
> Perhaps Intel seeded the OEMs with reference designs.  Perhaps the
> first Asus netbook showed a market.
> 
> Perhaps it is all marketting: users thought they knew what a netbook
> was when they saw it (a notebook, cut down).  Maybe they didn't see
> what they could do with, say, a Nokia n800 or an OLPC XO.

I think Asus showed that there was a market for lower performance tiny
cheap machines running normal PC software.

> What are you thinking of?  Those models already exist.  As far as I
> can tell, they are failures as platforms.  The iPhone seems to be a
> success.  But all I hear is (some) buzz.  I don't know reality.

What netbooks exist that aren't x86?

-- 
Len Sorensen
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