X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 17)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

Notebooks

The event of the month in the notebook market was the jubilee of the major trendsetter. IBM Thinkpad was 20 million in November after 11 years of being in the market. That’s a solid number, and IBM has become an inventor of numerous trends in the field, including the “folded” design.

On the other hand, 20 million divided by 11 years is less than 2 million notebooks annually. That’s not at all enough to be the leader. ASUS is going to ship a total of 1.9 million notebooks this year and boost the number even further in the next year, to 2.5 items, or by 30%!

And again, as with the mainboards, Elitegroup wants to boost their notebook sales by the same percent, although it is smaller in sheer numbers – 1.1 million items. And as with the mainboards, the plans look quite dubious. Dell also voiced its plans to stimulate the demand for its products, most of which look too similar to each other. That’s the problem the company is going to solve.

Well, whatever they do, they can’t get along without the main supplier. Intel remains it and even reinforced its position with the launch of the Centrino. According to IDC, notebooks on this platform account for 42% of the total sales volume by the results of this year. Well, this is only the beginning, as the same agency forecasts the share to grow up to 95% of the market by 2006.

The main feature of the platform is its wireless capability and that’s the matter Intel should be working on hard in the near future. The number of hot-swap points is too low so far, but the WiMAX (802.16) standard should play its role in resolving the problem of the Last Mile. Wi-Fi needs further development, too, and Intel has already chosen the companies to order 802.11g modules from for the Centrino 2.

Let me remind you that this platform is going to appear in the second half of 2004 and to include the Pentium M processor on the 90-nm Dothan core (the frequency starting from 1.6-1.8GHz, and the processor itself becoming available in the beginning of the year already) and mainboards on the Alviso chipset (PCI Express, DDR-II, Serial ATA, Gigabit Ethernet, Dolby Digital 7.1) plus those 802.11g modules.

Intel has been rather poor at graphics, but, fortunately, even the current realization of the Centrino allows using external graphics chips. Two such chips showed up in November. While NVIDIA offered a solution for “simple” users – the GeForce FX Go5700, which is very close to its desktop counterpart in characteristics and consuming 8W of power, ATI Technologies targeted professionals this time, unveiling its MOBILITY FireGL T2 on the FireGL 9600 core.

Thus, the performance of the two solutions should be quite similar. As for availability, notebooks with the GeForce FX Go5700 are not supposed to arrive until the first quarter of 2004, while the MOBILITY FireGL T2 comes in the nw8000 workstation from HP. Of course, it will be based on Centrino platform and will use new ATI and IBM chips.

Well, mobile workstations are not exactly what the Centrino implies, its main advantages being a compact size and economy. A good example is the most miniature Sony VAIO PCG-X505/P with a 12” screen, based on the 1GHz Pentium M, weighing less than 1kg and having a minimum thickness of less than 1cm.

Compared to such extremities, a solid mainstream product like the Acer TravelMate 370 looks like a heavy-weight, although Acer classifies it into a category of compact and ultra-compact notebooks: 1.77kg, 2.4cm thickness, 12” panel, external drives. So the Acer loses to the Sony in all but the price. The former costs $2315, the latter – $3230.