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• Opportunity: 100 million chips in three years? So, why is Silverthorne a big deal for Intel? If you look at the processor from the traditional view, it is nothing special. No new record levels of clock speeds, no multi-core and it doesn't hit a mass market - yet. But: Silverthorne expands Intel's x86 processor portfolio on the very low end to a product offering that now reaches from handhelds to supercomputers - or, as Intel likes to call it, from "Milliwatts to Petaflops". Yes, it is exaggerated, but you get the point. Broken down to its very basics, the business model of a semiconductor company is to sell chips, lots of chips and more of them every year. It's no secret that the desktop CPU market is declining and the notebook CPU segment is the growth area right now. But growth in this segment doesn't blow off your socks in terms of unit numbers. Server CPUs is also a business that does not provide room for substantially higher CPU shipments every quarter. If Intel is looking for new growth areas, which ones are there? Intel believes that it will be the handheld segment that will open the door to a whole new market, which has the potential to grow to a demand of dozens and even hundreds of millions of processors within a few years. Atom isn't ready to play in the smartphone market yet (which has an annual market volume of about 150 million processors by itself), but Intel wants the platform to capture market share in a segment that offers portable navigation, video and gaming. Unit sales of portable navigation devices (PNDs) were about 16 million in 2007, according to Intel; portable video players reached 10 million units and portable game consoles about 20 million. Obviously, there is a big market, which Intel thinks will expands to about 100 million units over the next two to three years. Menlow isn't the platform that will see shipments of dozens of millions of units. The form factor and battery time of these 5" devices is in our opinion not convincing enough to attract every mom and dad to buy such a $500+ device for themselves and their children, who, according to Intel, are skyping, texting and facebooking all the time. But it is easy to see that Menlow will spark a device generation that will easily outgrow the installed base of UMPCs, which we heard stands at about 2 million worldwide. In a way, Menlow could be powering the early-adopter version of a portable computing and communication platform the UMPC was promised to be. We have seen one promising MID, but there is no doubt that this generation will mainly bring OQO-sized devices that are too large and heavy to fit in your shirt pocket and, sorry Intel, seem to be designed for early adopters and not the mainstream consumer. That mainstream platform could be Moorestown, Menlow's successor. Moorestown is scheduled for a 2009/2010 launch and will be a SoC (that integrates the chipset) and Intel first try to become a serious player in the smartphone market. Perhaps we are wrong and consumers will buy MIDs right away. But, on second thought, we are fairly sure that this scenario would require Apple to help design and market MID. Maybe someone should call Steve Jobs?

• Round Up: Five Powerful, Light Ultraportables

  Ed: This piece first ran on our sister site—Tom’s Guide—a week ago. We don’t do much mainstream notebook coverage on Tom’s Hardware—we focus on the mobile gaming hardware instead. However, because these are ultraportables, we thought they’d warrant a look here on the hardware side of things. If you read this story on Tom’s Guide last week, hopefully this note saves you a few minutes (check out our first Holiday Buyer’s Guide of the year instead). If you missed it, though, we hope you enjoy it now. Take it away, Rachel. Consider The Ultraportable PC manufacturers and industry analysts can’t stop talking about netbooks, those itty-bitty machines designed for nothing more than a bit of Web browsing. Netbooks may be selling like hotcakes—they are quite cheap, after all—but they’re not ideal for those who want to see connectivity, power and productivity from a thin and light notebook. Take a netbook on a business trip, and it wouldn’t be able to hold all of your mission-critical applications and downtime entertainment. But what if you could have a featherweight machine that housed most of the innards you’d find in a 15-inch notebook? And how much would you pay for the privilege? Enter the ultraportable, a relatively new PC category taking the business and consumer markets by storm (though in the current economy, ultraportable manufacturers can’t take IT budgets for granted). Ultraportables are expensive; the five we gathered in our offices range in price from $1,699 to $2,999. But before you get sticker shock, keep in mind that to qualify as an ultraportable—at least the Tom’s Guide’s definition of one—a computer must meet several criteria. It must weigh under 3 pounds, have a screen 12.1 inches in size or smaller, be about an inch thick, and contain several advanced add-ons or possess a luxury design. And odds are that an ultraportable will also feature an extremely low-powered and energy efficient Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a built-in optical drive, an LED backlit screen*, perhaps a solid state drive, and most likely an install of Windows Vista Business. Most ultraportables have style, as well as the components to compete performance-wise with, say, a low-end 15-inch Dell. With ultraportables, there are sacrifices to be made for the sake of weight and size, though. An ultraportable is nobody’s sole PC—typically it is a third computer, but in some cases, a second. Typically, ultraportables are marketed as business laptops. Executives and employees constantly on the road may request them from their IT departments, or entrepreneurs may want tiny machines to show off to potential clients. Because of their appeal to this niche, ultraportables are often equipped with security-focused features like fingerprint scanners, and are designed to look deluxe, sophisticated and somewhat conservative. They are often sold with the option for a docking station so road warriors can come home to roost comfortably. They may have the option for extended warranties and specialized damage repair options. And most of them do come with Windows Vista Business already on the machine, to cater to this crowd. Ultraportables are also designed with consumers in mind. Some manufacturers are putting their little machines on sale in time for the holiday season, and sexy designs are catching the eyes of just about anyone who’d also consider the MacBook Air or any other popular 13.3” notebook. In this roundup, we’ve include the nearly weightless Toshiba R500, the leather-clad Asus U2E, the expressive Lenovo IdeaPad U110, the staid Fujitsu P8010, and the ultra high-end Sony Vaio TX (which Sony is currently phasing out in order to introduce the new Vaio TT that we will be reviewing soon). In addition to testing the battery life and benchmarking performance of these machines, I also tried to travel and live with these machines; in fact, I wrote each computer’s review on that machine. We’ve considered three other factors when scoring the machines, besides battery life and performance: style, usability and price. Each computer received a score out of five points in each of the five categories; you’ll find the category score at the end of each category section. In many ways, these five machines represent the early days of the ultraportable category. As manufacturers work out design kinks and components become ever smaller and stronger, we’ll soon—by necessity—determine entirely new definitions for the categories and methods for evaluating them. Testing Battery Life and Performance We tested battery life using the open source benchmark BatteryEater Pro v2.70. To test performance, we used Microsoft Windows Vista’s Windows Experience Index and FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage v1.00, with the November 2007 Hotfix. You can see the details of these tests on the Testing pages toward the end of this article. The Testing pages also present our methodology for the tests and for calculating summary scores (ranging from 1 to 5) for battery life and performance for each notebook. The summary scores are included in the discussion of each notebook immediately following. To better understand why our tests turned out as they did, be sure to check out the Ultraportable Specifications page, which provides a comprehensive list of components in each of the five notebooks we tested. *In the pages below, you will see pictures of ultraportable displays. Bear in mind that these photos are only relative representations of the screen’s true picture quality; we have not tested these displays for luminance or contrast levels.

• Hitachi took IDC data for its forecast, but you’ll find similar numbers and statements from various sources, as many developments are obvious. According to IDC, there is a constant annual growth rate of 10%. This is interesting, since the global market for bare hard drives doesn’t grow that much by itself. While IDC only expects small growth for desktop and mobile hard drive, it sees better opportunities for enterprise storage, in consumer storage, and external storage in particular. While enterprise storage requires dedicated products, consumer storage and external storage products are a good way to recycle existing product families and hence to sell more units. The enterprise market and small form factor applications in particular are seeing the largest relative growth—blade servers and high density computing solutions are the main drivers here. Thanks to the SATA and SAS interfaces, 2.5” enterprise hard drives have become a perfect fit for high density storage, providing fast and efficient performance at medium capacities. What about Flash SSDs? Hitachi doesn’t see flash SSDs gaining significant market share before 2010. The existing flash SSD generation is only capable of replacing drives in the high end such as for notebooks like the Apple Macbook Air or Lenovo’s X300. Flash SSDs are currently attacking the hard drive market both from the very high end, where excellent products such as Samsung’s 2.5” 64 GB SSD SATA-2 drive deliver better performance at much lower power consumption than any other 2.5” drive. It is, however, extremely expensive, at around $1,000—compared to a 320 GB hard drive at $150 this is many times the cost per GB. The second point of attack is the low end, as low-cost netbooks and other simple PC solutions can be equipped with 8 to 32 GB of flash-based storage. In such a case, a $60 hard drive still is too expensive and flash offers a cheaper alternative, even if performance suffers with these budget solutions. Flash storage has another disadvantage, which it won’t be able to overcome soon: capacities are too small for anyone who does more on the PC than just surfing. Notebook hard drives have reached 500 GB capacities, which is almost 8x more than the average 64 GB flash SSD can offer. Though flash drives will continue to double capacity faster than hard drives, conventional drives will also keep growing, as you will read on the following pages. This means that users will continue to buy hard drives to answer their basic storage requirements. HD movies, 12 megapixel photos, music archives, favorite TV series…all of this requires a lot of storage, which flash just cannot provide. Right now, flash SSDs are far from becoming mainstream products. Although all major vendors offer flash-based hard drives, most of these are still several times more expensive than hard drives offering similar capacities, and not all of them are actually much faster than conventional hard drives. Even if flash-based drives were closer to becoming mainstream products, they still could not replace the good old hard drive, as there isn’t enough flash memory production capacity to match the demand.