CES 2009 - TV Trends, WirelessHD, 240Hz and Netbook Pricing
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Ridiculous Netbook Pricing
Thanks for listening to me talk about TVs for a while, now let’s move on to more PC-topics. In particular, I’d like to address the ridiculous nature of netbook pricing.
I had the pleasure of dining with Intel’s Mooly Eden at CES. You may remember Mooly as the father of Centrino; he headed up the Banias design team, which was responsible for the very first Centrino CPU. These days Mooly is more marketing than engineering, but he hasn’t lost his ability to be frank.
I talked to Mooly about how the Atom processor wasn’t delivering enough performance for the netbooks that it’s in. I asked him what happens once Moorestown comes around; will Atom continue to be the netbook CPU of choice or will Intel introduce a very scaled down Nehalem for netbooks and use Atom in smartphones and other smaller devices?
To my surprise, Mooly said that the Atom delivered fine performance for netbooks. But it turned out that Mooly and I had very differing views on netbooks. Mooly’s view was that netbooks should be ultra affordable devices priced between $299 and $349. At those prices, Atom does deliver enough performance.
The reality of the situation however, is that manufacturers are shipping netbooks in the $500 - $900 range (way to go Sony) and outfitting them with 1.6GHz and even 1.33GHz Atom processors. I get that you’re paying a premium for the size of the device, but it seems to me that manufacturers are capitalizing on the newness of netbooks by attempting to price them much higher than they should be.
Stylish, it'll fit in your purse, but it's still got a CPU slower than what was in a mainstream notebook from 2004.
While Dell and HP should be commended on entering the market at or near that $299 - $349 range, I’d like to see more of that sort of behavior from their peers in the market. I think it’s very telling that Apple has opted out of building an Atom-based system thus far; the only reason it makes sense is if you price it very low, and that’s not something Apple would do. The alternative would be putting an Atom in a higher priced notebook, which would compromise the experience, something Apple is also not too keen on doing.
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superandroid - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
i think that the 60 ghz microwave frequency will be hazardous to the human brain because it can easily penetrate the human body.3DoubleD - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
That is incorrect. 60 GHz cannot easily penetrate the human body, which would actually be more reason to fear it than if it could simply just pass through. However, 60 GHz photons have such little energy that they can't possibly negatively influence the human body, just like all other radio communication and microwaves. Now if the transmitter is powerful enough that the absorbed energy turns into a significant amount of heat (eg a microwave oven), then you should worry about cooking yourself. Considering a microwave oven is ~1000 Watts and this transmitter will likely be on the order of a few hundred or thousand milliwatts, you have nothing to fear.michael145 - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
Man, imagine running Crysis at 4K's resolution with 4AA/4AF on...What machine do you need?
fly123 - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
anybody know if this will be usable with a media server, or is the wirelesshd consortium locking it down to oem because of drm fear?I mean, do any of you know if there are any plans for making a plugin device that one can plug into a pc and screen of own chosing?
Ive looked at the consotiums website, but havnt been able to find anything usefull.
Milleman - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
"Your inputs are connected wirelessly to the TV via a 60GHz signal..."That's a lot of Hertz. I didn't think 60 GHz was possible to produce with todays semiconductor technology.
Stampede103 - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
Does any one know of a netbook that is using Nvidia's Tegra 600 line of processors?sprockkets - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
When a netbook can play YouTube on the HQ setting without stuttering, I'll get one.I still like the HP one with the nice sized keyboard. If they used a Nano or Dual core Atom with Ion, this problem would be solved.
Denithor - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
Really?
Jynx980 - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
I thought that was really high as well. The closest thing I know of would be wireless phones with 5.8 GHz. This is more than 10x that amount so it seemed out of whack.I assume that WirelessHD will support HDCP, but it only states that it supports Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) in the wiki link. Another protection to worry about.
I like reading about TV stuff. Was there a Vizio booth at all? I would like to see their lineup for '09. Although the line is blurred more each year between TV and PC monitors, I wish there were more focus on PC monitors. It doesn't seem like there has been much innovation in this area.
3DoubleD - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_frequency">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_frequencyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WirelessHD">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WirelessHD
Both pages agree that not only is it possible, but the article is correct. This frequency range has (relatively) high attenuation in Earth's atmosphere and (usually) requires line-of-sight so it is really limited in terms of application. It should really make connecting devices much more easy. Apparently the first devices are supposed to support up to 10 feet without line-of-sight. They chose the extreme high frequency band because the strong absorption with oxygen molecules in the air will protect copyright owners by preventing you neighbors from using the signal. A competing technology uses bandwidth around 5 GHz to achieve 250 mbps throughput, but I guess copyright holders were a bit worried with the transmission distance.