ultrathins

Advanced Micro Devices discussed the Hemlock high-end graphics card due next week and third-generation ultra-thin laptop technology, among other topics, at the AMD Financial Analyst Day on Wednesday.

"Hemlock will get launched next week," said AMD Senior Vice President Rick Bergman, speaking Wednesday morning at the conference which was streamed live. "It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world. You can see there are two GPUs. Five Teraflops out of this baby," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics performance.)

Hemlock is expected to be appear as an HD 5900 series product--what some reports have called the HD 5970.

Bergman also addressed AMD's third-generation "Nile" ultra-thin laptop platform. "Bring the real PC experience into the ultra-thin. Battery life well north of seven hours," Bergman said. This is due… Read more

By not coughing up a low-cost MacBook, as some had expected, Apple has ceded a potentially huge market to PC makers. But is this just all part of Apple's marketing genius?

The announcement Tuesday of the $999 white polycarbonate MacBook was pretty ho-hum as product refreshes go (same price, same color as before) but the implication was important: Apple is surrendering a large, emerging laptop market to Microsoft and its coterie of PC makers.

Not that it's necessarily a bad strategy. Market researcher Gartner said recently that Apple's shipments in the U.S. grew year-over-year by 6.8 percent to total 1.57 million during the third quarter, putting it right behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Acer. Comparatively, overall PC shipments in the U.S. grew by 3.5 percent from a year earlier.

But among those unimpressive overall PC numbers (HP's third-quarter shipments grew only 2.7 percent), was an impressive statistic for Acer: buoyed by Netbooks, Acer's shipments grew by 61.4 percent year-over-year, and it blew past Dell to become the No. 2 PC maker worldwide based on this growth.

Granted, Netbooks are a relatively low-profit segment (i.e., profit on a $400 Netbook is going to be a lot less than that on a $999 laptop). Nevertheless, they're a hot market. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has stated numerous times that Intel was able to create a market that grew faster than either the iPhone or Nintendo Wii. Case in point: Windows 7-based Acer Netbooks are now big on the Home Shopping Network--which claims to have sold more than 5,000 in one segment on Saturday.

And that's not the only market Apple is punting on. A new category of inexpensive, thin laptops has emerged with the roll-out of Windows 7 on Thursday. Like Netbooks, these laptops are light (typically 4 pounds) and don't include an optical drive. But they are relatively powerful and full featured. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire Timeline, for example, with a 320GB hard disk drive and dual-core Intel processor is fairly well-endowed at only $500.

Apple is not receiving a lot kudos in the mainstream business press… Read more

The chief executives of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices indicated this week that competition will heat up in the market for sleek, inexpensive laptops running Windows 7.

Both CEOs addressed this new market during conference calls after their companies reported earnings this week. Ultrathin laptops are inexpensive, light laptops--typically between $500 and $800--that are sold in a market segment just above less expensive Netbooks.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini on Tuesday said his company is gearing up to supply more power-efficient chips that contain two processing cores for better performance. "The bulk of the units that have shipped to date … Read more

Giving the MacBook Air and the Dell Adamo a run for their money in the thin/coffee-shop sexy department, the Sony Vaio X Series notebook previewed at IFA Berlin definitely has the looks to rise to the top. At less than half an inch thick and weighing 1.5 pounds, it certainly could be one of the thinnest thin-and-lights out there, and a carbon fiber exterior should help with durability. Internal 3G and an "all day and into the night" battery also sound nice.

As to price and specs beyond an 11.1-inch screen, we're as curious … Read more

A rip-out-the-carpet PC refresh of both software and hardware is in the offing as Microsoft's latest operating system and new laptop designs converge later this year.

At the Intel Technology Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, an executive described the imminent mobile future, including a major refresh of Netbook silicon, better-designed "ultrathins," and turbo-powered high-end laptops.

Netbooks may undergo the biggest change. Models that appear after Windows 7 ships in October will see the most significant overhaul internally since the Netbook category debuted back in the spring of 2008. Intel's new "Pine Trail" Atom … Read more

A few tweaks of the MacBook and Apple could render the Netbook a non-issue.

At the risk of adding to the cacophony of gratuitous advice directed at Apple, the company could bypass the Netbook and go directly to the inexpensive "ultrathin" category--where Apple seems to be headed anyway with the incredibly shrinking price of the MacBook Air. In short, take the thin, aluminum unibody enclosure that is a MacBook and move it downmarket.

Ultrathins are Netbooks without the compromises. A light, small, pick-up-and-go design that has a reasonable size screen and the horsepower do to what a conventional … Read more

During Intel's earnings conference call Tuesday, CEO Paul Otellini said inexpensive "ultra-thins" will give users what they're missing in Netbooks, a theme that the chipmaker has been reiterating in various forums lately.

Intel continues to try to maneuver this new and more profitable category of laptops into territory where Netbooks continue to hold mindshare. Ultra-thins are low-cost laptops, typically with 13-inch screens, based on Intel's ultra-low-power (ULV) chips. Netbooks have screens usually no larger than 11 inches and use Intel's lower-cost, lower-performance Atom processor.

Echoing prior comments by other executives, Otellini said that ultra-thins … Read more

Hewlett-Packard was one of the early trendsetters in the ultrathin laptop market with its Voodoo design. But the product has languished for more than a year. What happened--or what will happen--isn't clear.

The ultrathin laptop market is hot and one of the most visible laptop segments today. And activity in this segment has spiked recently in the wake of a raft of new, inexpensive thin laptops from MSI, Acer, and Lenovo, using low-power Intel chips.

The Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo are two of the most prominent designs. The Air has now been refreshed twice. Dell's svelte Adamo was announced in March, complementing its ultrathin business laptop, the Latitude E4200.

But the razor-thin 0.7-inch-thick Voodoo Envy 133--first announced in June 2008--has stood still.… Read more

Netbooks had a rocky start last year in some markets, Intel's marketing chief said at the Intel investor meeting Tuesday.

"In the first period--June, July, August of last year--there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (Netbooks) as notebooks," Sean Maloney said in a question-and-answer session that was streamed over the Web. "They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there--it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which … Read more