Reevaluating Laptops

I used to have a small website called Rep's Simple Page where I first started this whole rambling thing. I sucked at HTML and I would put in all the little markup commands by hand, so it was really primitive looking. It would have felt right at home in the 80s. The cool thing about that little site was that for whatever reason, it felt really private. I would voice my most controversial opinions as brashly as I pleased, basically emulating The Best Page in the Universe but without all the humor or wit, because I didn't think anybody would read them. Last night I went through an archive of some of the ramblings I wrote, and between cringing at the grammar I was struck by how crass and raw it was, something I sadly think I've lost since moving my stuff here. Nothing's really changed -- if anything it's more private here, but I write as if I'm trying to be objective; like I've got the reputation of a major journalistic website riding on it. I'm supposed to be angry, goddammit! Fuck objectivity!

But I digress. A lot of my writings back then were relics of their time, reflecting the trends that were occurring then, and in retrospect bringing to mind the trends that I never saw coming. One particularly good example of this was my Laptops vs Netbooks rambling, which I've taken care to upload here. If ever there was a quaint snapshot of the computing world before tablets, that would be it.

Mobile Convergences

I feel it's time to revisit the subject of mobile devices. I've written a couple times on the subject, mostly focusing on ARM processors in doing so. But the subject covers a broad array of design houses, manufacturers, as well as form factors. It's something that's worth looking at from a fresh perspective after it's had some time to evolve further.

The mobile craze really started around the time of the recession, at the height of the economic slump (there's an oxymoron). The iPhone came out in 2007, and took the friendliness of iPods and merged them with the versatility of smartphones, while adding some completely new concepts to the mix. The result was a revolution, and competition was quick to emerge, and eager to make a grab at its potential market.

Around the same time, netbooks were building a lot of steam. They were cheap computers when people couldn't afford to spend very much, and over time even grew to have their own advantages over more expensive alternatives. They evolved into more elegant shapes and sizes, and with more powerful hardware, while offering leading-edge battery life that couldn't be found in many other portable PCs. They were the right product at the right time, and tapped a need in the market that few others had even thought of before.

iPad redux

When the first iPad came about, I like much of the internet media and public rejected the idea as derivative and superfluous. I didn't see the market for an oversized iPod Touch, and didn't see Apple putting much thought into the design other than to say "it's magic". Well I like many others were dead wrong, and the thing sold like crack candy. I should know better than to doubt the success of an Apple-branded consumer device. But really, as little effort as Apple put into it, they touched on the desire for tablet computers way before anyone else, and because they were Apple, people flocked to it, eager to get a hold of the new form factor. Sometimes good timing is all you need.

So in the wake of an onslaught of competing tablets bursting at the seams for a release, we have the iPad 2, destined to continue the success of the original, again with very little effort. It's the first iPad, but with a thinner enclosure and faster hardware, and the cameras finally glued in place. In a nod to Moore's Law, it debuts at the same price of the predecessor, and from that perspective you can say they're at least not gouging people on it. But the reality is Apple's up to their old tricks of arrogance with a pinch of innovation, except in the case of the tablet market, their only selling point is that they came first. That helps them win the popularity contest, but things are going to become a great deal more cutthroat in a short amount of time.

ARMed for a Revolution

Back in 2009 I first wrote about ARM in a rambling I titled ARM's Ascension in which I talked about the rising aspirations and potential of ARM processors in the general computing field. A lot of what I said still rings true, and a lot of what seemed apparent in the future of the market back then is now known to not be true anymore. Smartbooks were prototyped many times, but never made it into shipping products. Instead what happened was the iPad.

iPad ended up doing exactly what many other Apple products have done in the past. When Apple entered the portable media player market, it flourished. When they entered the smartphone market, it flourished. Now that they've entered the tablet market, or maybe better said, initialized the tablet market, that market is set to flourish also. At the forefront of this new emerging form factor is ARM. No matter what SoC your product is using, be it Apple A4, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Hummingbird, or NVIDIA Tegra 2, ARM lies in the center of it. From the get-go it seems ARM has an iron grip on the market, leaving competitors, namely Intel, with a cliff face of an uphill climb if they want in on it.

Bobcat versus the caterpillar

Previews are out for the new Bobcat platform from AMD, technically called the Brazos platform, but Bobcat is the architecture powering it. It sorta coincides with the Bulldozer architecture powering the Scorpius platform, although in the real world, Bobcat makes bulldozers, not the other way around.

iPass

There's a lot to love about the tablet concept. People are moving towards smaller computers, and that means desktops are getting replaced by notebooks. And since notebooks are hot, bulky, and lose their charge real quick, they must be replaced with something that's easier to tote around. Netbooks are much easier to carry, and have good battery life, but you still need a place to put them when in use. Then you have smartphones, but generally they're too small to get any real work done.

So then the concept of the tablet comes in. Let me first say that I'm not talking about those laptops with swiveling touchscreens...hell no. I'm talking about the convergence of the strengths of smartphones and laptops into one device that's as easy to carry around the house as it is to carry around world. Anand describes the idea well. It's a Star Trek-like device (as he puts it) built for a totally new and emerging usage model. Like him, it's the sort of thing I've been waiting a long time for. So when Apple announced the iPad, my interest was piqued.

Updates, updates...

So CES is this week. Palm launched new stuff. Intel launched new stuff. AMD launched new stuff. More importantly, NVIDIA launched new stuff.

NVIDIA has succeeded again in releasing another SoC that everyone wants. Hopefully they succeed this time at actually delivering it to everyone who wants one. Last time Tegra's only notable design win was the Zune HD, a largely forgettable media player that...well, everyone largely forgot about shortly after its release. But that was all it had. Earlier at the start of this blog I had gushed at the possibilities of its use in smartbooks, only to be disappointed at the close of the year by the absence of said smartbooks. Turns out Mobinnova (and others) was simply waiting for Tegra 2, and for good reason. Packing two out-of-order dual-issue FPU-enabled ARM Cortex A9s, it beats the shit out of Tegra 1. Every demo of a tablet (I guess some are calling those "slate PCs" now) or smartbook using Tegra showed a sluggish running system. The thing was simply not meant for full-sized computing endeavours, and let's face it, we're not even talking full-sized demands here. But Tegra 2 should have no problem handling any Firefox-browsing aspirations, and hell even some HD media and gaming on the side. Cooler still, it's built on 40nm. Usually side products like this--chipsets, bridge chips, NVIO, whatever else NVIDIA makes that's not a GPU--get second class manufacturing, but not this time. I guess it's a sign NVIDIA's really taking this seriously, and if worst comes to worst, I think they're banking on supporting themselves on this little "side product" if at all possible. Apparently they see the mobile SoC market as being worth billions, overshadowing any other market they've ever been in, so it could very well be the next big thing for them. Well, the only other big thing for them aside from GPUs. For now let's hope Tegra 2 makes it into some kickass products that we can actually buy.