Notebook based on AMD’s Second Generation Ultrathin Platform

It’s real easy to describe the 2nd generation ultrathin design: Take the 1st generation, give it a second CPU core and take nearly the performance of the first generation’s discrete card, shrink it and place it into the chipset decreasing energy consumption.  Oh yeah, and add sprinkles of VISION Technology.  Easy, right?  Don’t tell the engineers I said that.

Specs for MSI notebook based on AMD’s 2nd Generation Ultrathin Platform

• CPU: AMD Athlon Neo X2 Dual Core Processor L335 at 1.6 GHz.
• GPU: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
• Display: 12″ at 1366×768 resolution with HDMI for 1080P bliss and VGA port out

• RAM/HDD/Optical: 2GB (dual channel)/160GB/None
• Memory Slot: SD/SDHC/MMC
• Networking: Bluetooth, Gig-E, and BGN wireless
• 3 USB ports
• 1.3 MP Webcam

Size Matters

The best way to do a size comparison is to compare it to something someone may be familiar with.  Below are comparisons to a BlackBerry Bold and an MSI U100 Netbook.

MSI notebook based on AMD’s 2^nd Generation Ultrathin platform next to a BlackBerry Bold

MSI U100 Netbook next to MSI notebook based on AMD’s 2nd Generation Ultrathin platform

MSI U100 Netbook on top of an MSI notebook based on AMD’s 2nd Generation Ultrathin platform

HD Video Playback-Bring It On

The MSI ripped through HD video off of the web from YouTube HD as well as Hulu HD (to my surprise).  I also played HD files from my Sony Webbie (1080P/30FPS) and Kodak ZI6 (720P/60FPS) inexpensive HD palmcorders and it didn’t even break a sweat.  I plugged an external Blu-Ray drive and two movies with Cyberlink 8, “I Am Legend” and “Speed Racer”, and I never saw CPU utilization go above 25%.  Add this to the ability to project externally at 1080P video to my HDTV along with high-fidelity audio over the HDMI port and cable and I was real happy.

Games- Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Like the AMD 1st generation ultrathin platform, the 2nd generation ultrathin platform can (of course) play mainstream games well like the Sims and Spore, but even the more hard-core games (albeit at low settings) like Left 4 Dead. I must caveat by saying that if you consider yourself a gamer, go for a system that has a higher end GPU like the higher end ATI Radeon HD 3000 or HD 4000 series.  But if you play games but don’t consider yourself a gamer, no need to worry, you get a real ATI-branded graphics capability, not a generic brand in many systems.

Web Browsing- Flash Eater

I already described how this MSI notebook tore through YouTube HD and Hulu HD so why bring up anything else?  Well, it’s called Flash and it’s the basis for a ton of web sites and it chews up inordinate amounts of power.  Try this test- open up task manager to see how much CPU is being used then go to americanidol.com and then disney.com.  If you have one of those underpowered machines, you know what happens.  If you have a notebook based on the 2nd generation ultrathin platform, you get a good experience where the CPU isn’t pegging at 100%.

Conclusion

The 2nd generation ultrathin platform turned out exactly as I would have hoped: lighter, cooler, and more powerful to enable consumers to have an even better experience than they did with the first generation.  No-compromise computing in a thin package at a good value.  As “Active” and “Resting” battery life benchies go, the lab is working on those and I will update my blog when I get them.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Ultrathin laptops have been the talk of the press for about 6 months now, but the reality is that many laptops that will ship in 2009 will likely have 14″ or larger displays and not be ultrathin. Why? Many consumers prefer the full-featured nature of those notebooks with their larger displays, integrated optical drives, larger keyboards, expandability and for the most part, the ability to crank more quickly through software.  That’s where AMD’s newest full-featured platform comes in with all its entertainment goodies with VISION.  I got the chance to take a drive in a new MSI C-Series notebook based on the 2009 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform (codename “Tigris”), and it had a few tricks in store I MUST share.

Tigris-based MSI Notebook Specs

• CPU: AMD Turion^TM II X2 Dual Core Mobile Processor M640 at 2.6 Ghz.
• GPU: ATI Radeon^TM HD 4200 Graphics
• Display: 16″ 16:9 at 1366×768 resolution
• Video out: HDMI and VGA port
• Keyboard: Full-size with full number pad
• RAM/HDD/Optical: 4GB/300GB/DVD-RW
• Memory Slot: SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro
• Networking: Bluetooth, Gig-E, and B/G/N wireless
• 1 E-SATA port/USB combo port
• 2 USB ports (3 if you count combo)
• ExpressCard 34 slot
• Webcam (1.3 MP) and microphone

Video Encoding- A Giant Leap

The most amazing and new feature of this Tigris-based notebook for me was the GPU-assisted video transcoding.  Quite simply, video transcoding is changing the format of a video to be played on another device.  One example is taking a family video on an HD camera and encoding it to play on an iPod or iPhone.

Of the 15 videos I tested, when I was using the GPU, I got nearly twice the performance or the time was nearly cut in HALF! Your mileage will vary with video type of course and I have seen published numbers of even higher scores converting to a PSP.  You can see a video of this in action here.

This is accomplished through the graphics card’s ATI Stream Technology and using the ATI Stream-enabled Cyberlink Espresso software application.

Video Playback- Reality is King

The “Tigris” platform has taken the video playback capabilities of its predecessor and placed it on steroids.  Not only do you get the HD video offload capabilities, which means lower CPU utilization and heat, but now the visual quality is greatly enhanced.  The features are described in super-geek terms like “dynamic contrast”, “flesh tone enhancement”, “HD color vibrance”, but it basically means that whites are brighter, blacks are richer, skin tones look more realistic, and the colors look better.  I noticed the differences when I connected the Tigris-based MSI notebook to my 1080P flat screen TV.

A couple of other cool video features that I thought were useful were video upscaling and Blu-ray PIP acceleration.  Video upscaling takes lower resolution videos like 400×240 and converts them to look better when shown on a larger screen (e.g.  1920×1080).  Here is a nice example here.  Blu-ray PIP acceleration allows you to watch a Blu-ray enabled movie (with PIP) with much lower CPU utilization, which results in less heat and noise.

AMD’s Ian McNaughton has done a fine job in his blog drilling down on key video features.

Games- Plow through Mainstream

Like video, the “Tigris” platform has taken the gaming capabilities of its predecessor to the next level.  While we would recommend to those who would consider themselves “gamers” a full discrete card, the ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics didn’t disappoint.  In fact it impressed me more than I thought it would.

I started off with a simple 3DMark 06 test and was surprised at the 1,800 base score I achieved, particularly with last year’s 2008 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform (codename “Puma”)  coming in at around 1,500.  Why?  The ATI Radeon HD 4200graphics are based on the RV620 core, a step ahead of the ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics based on the RV610 core.

Forget benchies a second, I wanted to try out a few games that a user would probably play on this system.  So I was forced to try some mainstream games: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Sim City Societies, Ghostbusters, Sims 3, and X-Men Origins Wolverine.  I had a good experience on all of them with decent frame rates and resolutions.  For fun I loaded Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty World at War, and Tom Clancy’s Hawx.  Sure, take down the res and some of the eye candy; just the fact that they were playable on integrated graphics is a feat in itself.

One final feature I must point out is the “Tigris” platform’s support of Direct X 10.1 from Microsoft, currently the latest graphics technology available until DirectX 11 arrives sometime next month.  It allows either better looking games or better performance.  While I didn’t personally run these FPS scores the lab did, and on higher end games with some eye candy on the ATI Radeon HD 4200 drove HAWX at 1024×768 at 25FPS, Battleforge at 1280×1024 at 24FPS, and Stalker: Clear Sky at 30 FPS, while the competition either crashed or had worse than a third the performance and experience.

Why would any consumer buy a system with generic or dated graphics?  Beats me.

Thin Is In: Tigris-based MSI Notebook  next to the MSI notebook based on AMD’s Second Generation Ultrathin Platform

Conclusion

For that full-sized, full-featured mobile experience, I was impressed with the MSI system based on the “Tigris” platform.  Like I said above, the video encoding quantum leap was amazing and just shows how powerful the combination of the GPU and CPU working together can be.  Increasing the stakes on the video playback side was a treat and fun to try out and see all those features.  Finally, with support for Direct X 10.1 technology from Microsoft and the ability to play real games and of course mainstream games, the system should keep all the mainstreamers happy and surprise even some gamers.  Now that’s VISION.  Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Observations

• 23% increase over the prior two weeks in the number of SKUs advertised with battery life.  (34 to 42 SKUs) 23 SKUs I observed advertised battery life or inference to it during the week of 8/10/09, and 19 the week of 8/17/09.   (See raw data at very end of blog.)
• 2X increase in the number of ways battery life is being advertised.
  • Four different ways observed from weeks of 7/27 and 8/3:
    • “up to X hours, Y minutes”
    • “up to X hours” (no minutes)
    • “X+ hours” (no “up to”)
    • “X cell battery for longer performance” (adds concept of battery cell)
  • Five NEW ways battery life was described or inferred to the consumer weeks of 8/10 and 8/17 in addition to those listed above:
    • “up to X hours of battery life that will last in class all day” (adds idea of all day computing)
    • “X  cell battery” (no information on what this means)
    • “X cell battery will give you up to X hours of battery life”
    • “X cell Li-ion battery” (no battery life claim and introduces battery type)
    • Graphic with icons, small description, but no data.

    

• Still in these advertisements there is still only one battery life measurement being advertised.  This is like buying a car and only seeing the “up to 52 MPG,” even though you would never realize that gas mileage in city driving.  Also, it’s like advertising battery life for a mobile phone and only listing “up to 300 hours battery life”.  (See raw data at very end of blog.)
• Apple notebooks never list battery life, only Windows-based PCs.
• Two retailers provided disclaimers for the advertised battery life information.  (See raw data at very end of blog.)

Conclusion

Net-net, more notebooks are advertising battery life or inferring it, and the different ways of describing it to the consumer has more than doubled.  Some questions:

• Do nine different ways to describe battery life help set clear battery life expectations? I will let you be the judge.
• Do disclaimers or explanations behind the metric help increase awareness? Do they deserve broader application? I will let you be the judge.
• Does one single measurement of battery life help tell the whole story? I will let you be the judge.

If you would like to read more about the battery life discussion, please find the links below:

Nigel Dessau’s blogs on battery life

Pat Moorhead’s (me) blogs on battery life

FriendFeed page with select press articles

Improving Understanding of Notebook PC Battery Life Measurements

Let me know what you think!

NOTES:

Week of 8-10-09

Week of 8-17-09

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Buyers look at many variables in making their client decision (ie brand, reputation, system quality and reliability, post-sales service and support, energy efficiency, managability), one which is software performance.  One way purchase evaluators measure the software performance of the potential systems is through benchmark packages aka “benchmarks”. These are software packages that basically measure the software performance then use the results to compare different PCs being considered.

I wanted to poll the “community” of PC purchase evaluators in business and government to see what they use.  Sure, we have quantitative information and have face-to-face meetings with key commercial end users, but the “community” never ceases to amaze me with their insight and answers.  Please don’t let me down.

Each IP address can vote only once and you only get one choice.  I’ll post a real-time summary of the aggregate results – I won’t be identifying individual voters or their choices.

Thanks for the insight and any details on “why” you chose what you chose would be apprecuated in the comments section.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Week of 7-27-2009

Week of 8-3-2009

Observations

• 14 notebook SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 7/27/09, and 20 SKUs I observed advertised battery life during the week of 8/3/09.

• In these advertisements there is still only one battery life measurement being advertised.  This is like buying a car and only seeing the “up to 52 MPG,” even though you would never realize that gas mileage in city driving.  Also, it’s like advertising battery life for a mobile phone and only listing “up to 300 hours battery life”.

• Battery life as I observed it is being advertised four different ways:
  • “up to X hours, Y minutes”
  • “up to X hours” (no minutes)
  • “X+ hours” (no “up to”)
  • “X cell battery life for longer performance”

• Only two retailers out of eight I observed provided disclaimers for the advertised battery life information.

During the holiday time frame, we hope and expect this situation to change. A few retailers have unofficially indicated that they are planning to adopt a “Min and Max” (aka guardrail approach) to notebook battery life communications.  Based on the lack of consistency I observed in the circulars, I expect this will be a very welcome change for consumers.

Above is a sample graphic that AMD has proposed for this guardrail approach.

If you would like to read more about the battery life discussion, please find the links below:

Nigel Dessau’s blogs on battery life

Pat Moorhead’s (me) blogs on battery life

FriendFeed page with select press articles

Improving Understanding of Notebook PC Battery Life Measurements

Let me know what you think!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Main iPhone Information Page

When consumers navigate to the main iPhone page, about ¾ of the page down you see a link that says, “iPhone 3GS or Iphone 3G: Compare”.

Compare iPhones Page

Click this and you go to a comparison page of the iPhone 3G versus iPhone 3GS.  About ¾ down the page, you see a battery life comparison:

These seems like intuitive figures to provide a consumer, yet Apple is already operating in rarefied air in providing this much consumer information.  But wait, what about the details on what was tested, you ask?  Apple iPhone delivers, again.  When you click on the disclaimer (3) you are brought down to a line that says, “3) All battery claims depend on network configuration and many other factors; actual results will vary. For more details of iPhone performance tests for talk time, standby time, Internet use over 3G, Internet use over Wi-Fi, video playback, and audio playback, see www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html.”

Full Battery Life Performance Testing Disclosure Page

Click on the link in the disclaimer above and you are brought to a page that contains more battery life procedure testing than I have ever seen before. These 1,173 words of technical bliss scream detail.  Sure, someone could chose to pick at the way the testing was done, but you cannot complain about the detailed disclosure.  The page meticulously goes through the tests performed, the hardware used, and how it was done.

Who Cares?

We have made it very public and clear that AMD is striving to guide the PC industry to deliver better notebook PC battery life information for consumers.  Nigel and I have articulated the challenges and provided suggestions to this.  We expect some in the industry to adopt these, but some will sit on the sidelines.  To those who choose to sit I ask, how do you feel about better battery life information being disclosed on a $99 iPhone than a $799 notebook PC?  Industry, we can do better than the cell phone industry.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

As a reminder, MobileMark 2007 is now being advertised and merchandised in retail circulars across the US. This benchmark is developed by the Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCO).  (More background and our suggestions for more accurate battery life metrics can be found here, here, and here.)

Applications in MMO7 compared to consumer use

In my opinion, it is not credible to construct a consumer benchmark consisting primarily of applications that business people use. To demonstrate my point, take a look at the battery life benchmark applications now being used in consumer adverts.

These benchmarked applications inside MM07 include: Microsoft Project 2003 for project management, Microsoft Excel 2003 for calculation sheets, Microsoft Outlook 2003 for email, calendar and scheduling, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 for presentations, Microsoft Word 2003 for word processing, WinZip Computing WinZip 10.0 for archive compression, Adobe Photoshop CS2 for manipulating and compressing images, Adobe Illustrator CS2 for manipulating images and Adobe Flash 8 for vector graphics and animation.

Do these look like your most commonly used consumer PC applications to you?  Here’s my personal list of most commonly used consumer applications as a starting point:

• Web browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome or Internet Explorer. And with browsers come Google, Gmail, YouTube, Hulu, ESPN.com, Disney.com, etc.
• Music apps like iTunes or Windows Media player
• Video or movie playback for DVDs, Blu-ray or iTunes movies or TV shows
• Games like Spore, Sims, and Worlds of Warcraft

Like I said, you be the judge.

Application % weightings in MM07 compared to usage patterns

Even if we pretend for a moment that consumers don’t use web browsers, listen to music, watch videos or play games, and they primarily use the listed MM07 apps. Surely someone on the planet does that, right?

BAPCO has published MM07’s “distribution of measured application task times“, or in other words the apps the tested notebook was running 5-10% of the time when it wasn’t idling or resting 95-90% of the time.

Inside MM07, The “measured application task times” for Adobe Flash Creation is 33.6%, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is 21.8%, Adobe Illustrator CS2 is 16.7%, Microsoft Excel is 16.6%, WinZip 10.0 is 7.1%, Microsoft Word is 1.1%, Microsoft PowerPoint is 1.0%, Microsoft Project is 1.2% and Microsoft Outlook is 1.0%.

I ask, when you use your notebook, do you spend 72% of your time recoding Flash videos, manipulating and compressing pictures in Photoshop and Illustrator?   I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that is not an accurate reflection of most of our usage profiles!

MM07 Applications compared to retail notebook software loads

One final aspect I would like to examine is the software preloaded on retail notebooks compared to the MM07 load. I also looked up the potential costs associated with a consumer adopting the MM07 software load if they bought it on their own.

I took what looked like popular notebooks and those which advertised battery life and compared their software load with MM07’s software load. I looked at five notebooks advertised in major Sunday circulars last weekend and here is what I found.

Granted this is a pretty limited sample, but as you can see above, there was 0% correlation between the MM07 software load and what is installed on these notebooks. Note: SKUs #1 and #2 did have a 60 day edition of MS Office Pro⁽¹⁾.  SKUs #3, 4, and 5 came with 60 day edition of MS Office Student Edition⁽²⁾.  Close but no cigar.

I then looked at what it would cost a consumer to buy the latest and greatest MM07 updated apps.  Here is what it could cost at retail:

As you can see above, it would cost the consumer approximately $2,701 at retail to load all of the updated MM07 applications.

Conclusion

My goal was to compare MobileMark 2007 (MM07) application selection and activity distribution and compare that to a consumer’s behavior. I showed the following:

1) MM07 Productivity is utilized in consumer facing advertisements to indicate comparative notebook battery life.
2) MM07 Productivity tested applications do not contain a single web browser, music app, video playback app, or game.
3) 72% of MM07’s application usage comes from Flash video encoding and photo manipulation and compression in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
4) MM07 tested applications have a 0% correlation between what is pre-loaded on retail notebooks and are six years old on average. (Yes, I admit it was a small sample, but you get my point…)
5) If a user bought software representing the MM07 test suite, it could cost $2,701 at retail.

I ask you, do MM07 applications represent real world consumer usage behavior and purchase characteristics?  You be the judge.

Notes:

⁽¹⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office Pro2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher)

⁽²⁾ loaded w/MS Works (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) & 60-day trial of MS Office 2007 Home & Student Edition (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote)

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I kindly asked the PR team to provide me with some of the reviews and headlines, and it appears that many agree with our assessments.

Here are the highlights, and I recommend visiting the sites to get the full download.  I have separated the reviews into the following segments: Blu-ray experience, HD video capabilities, gaming experience, content creation capabilities, and AMD and HP’s new category creation:

Blu-ray Experience

ComputerShopper: HP Pavilion dv2-1030us, John Delaney

• “We were also impressed with the system’s video-handling prowess; the ATI graphics did a good job of delivering smooth playback of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on Blu-ray.”

SlashGear: HP dv2 and Blu-ray preview, Steven Grady

• “The dv2 is running Vista Home Premium, and plays Blu-ray movies beautifully on the display. The dv2 has an HDMI port for making it easy to use the dv2 as your home Blu-ray player with your HDMI television…”

CrunchGear: HP’s new external Blu-ray driver is sleek as hell, Devin Coldeway

• “The Blu-ray drive that will be coming with the HP dv2 “ultra-slim” notebook is looking really nice. It’s shiny, gorgeous, and incredibly thin. I thought I better get some pictures of this sexy accessory up so you guys know how HP rolls with this new stylish line of not-netbooks-but-not-notebooks.”

HD Video Capabilities

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “If you want to connect your laptop to your HDTV and watch 1080p video, the dv2 can handle it.”

JKOntherun.com: HP dv2 on a Road Trip: First Impressions, Kevin Tofel

• “I mentioned HD video playback before. I decided to download and view some 720p content before closing out this post. Hitting up the Microsoft WMV HD Content Showcase, I downloaded the “Super Speedway” video; something I wouldn’t even bother doing with a netbook. I expected playback to be superb and the dv2 didn’t disappoint. It was a joy to watch: I couldn’t detect any stutter or dropped frames.”

JKOntherun.com: HPdv2 Battery Tests Illustrate Compromise of Power vs. Performance, Kevin Tofel

• “Of course, the intent and design of this device is to do just that: you can’t effectively enjoy high quality video on a netbook. And while you can watch high-def media on other notebooks at this price, they’ll generally weigh more and/or have a bigger footprint.”

Gaming Experience

TGDaily: The netbook-killing HP dv2, Rob Enderle

• “The product feels high quality and the graphics performance exceeds anything else short of a gaming box that I’ve had in this year.”

Notebooks.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Unboxed, First Impressions, Xavier Lanier

• “the Pavilion dv2 is the first notebook that’s based on AMD’s Yukon platform, which combines an Athlon Neo processor with ATI Mobility Radeon HD3410 graphics. The result is a computer that can be used to watch high-definition video and handle some 3D games.”

SlashGear: HP dv2 and Blu-ray preview, Steven Grady

• “it has been promised to me that the dv2 will game with the best of them, thanks to the ATI graphics card. Fear 2, Call of Duty: World at War and others are said to run amazingly well on this tiny device, showing the capability of a good GPU paired with a less power-intensive processor.”

Notebooks.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Game Demo: Call of Duty World at War, Xavier Lanier

• “The HP Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable notebook that’s affordable, but has enough graphics muscle that users can enjoy video games….”

Content Creation Capabilities

PC Magazine: HP Pavilion dv2 (1030us), Cisco Cheng

• “So how did the Neo processor fare against the Atom in actual testing? The dv2, with its Neo processor, showed its muscle in video encoding tests, outperforming the Atom-powered Asus 1000HE by 20 seconds and the Mini 12 by 1 minute, 18 seconds. It was the only one that completed Photoshop CS4 tests, finishing in 1 minute 49 seconds (the Dell 12 did not complete the test and the 1000HE’s resolution was too low to even run the test.”
• “In terms of raw horsepower, the Neo clearly has an advantage over Atom.”

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “If you want to edit high-resolution images in Photoshop while you’re on vacation, the dv2 can handle it.”

ComputerShopper: HP Pavilion dv2-1030us, John Delaney

• “Compared with other netbooks, the dv2 performed brilliantly, scoring a class-leading 1,261 on our Cinebench 10 benchmark, while the Atom-based Dell Inspiron Mini 12 and Asus N10Jc came in at 718 and 774, respectively.”

Creating the New Affordable Ultrathin Category

PC World: Netbook or Ultraportable: Which is Best for the Job?, James Martin

• “DV2 blurs the lines between netbook and ultraportable more than most portable computers. That’s just $120 more than a high-end HP Mini 2140 netbook, which can’t compare to the dv2’s more robust specs.”

TechNewsWorld: The Death and Rebirth of Silicon Valley, Rob Enderle

• “By creating a hybrid between a netbook and a notebook, the DV2 falls into an interesting product gap. It isn’t as small as a netbook, it is vastly less expensive than a small notebook, it has more performance than many notebooks have (let alone netbooks) and it still costs under US$750.”

JKOntherun.com: HP dv2 Runs the CrystalMark Benchmark Gauntlet, Kevin Tofel

• “The AMD Neo platform is squarely targeted between the netbook market and traditional notebooks. You can get traditional notebook performance in a near-netbook sized package: call it a more portable package than a standard notebook, but not as anemic as a netbook.”

ZDNet: HP Pavilion dv2: Netbook or Notebook?, Jennifer Bergen

• “If Goldilocks was in the market for a laptop, she might pick the new HP Pavilion dv2. It’s not too big, and not too small. It sits between the large and expensive notebooks, and the small-screened netbooks – it’s just right.”

TGDaily: The netbook-killing HP dv2, Rob Enderle

• “As it was designed to be, this is a product that falls within the price range of netbooks and provides capabilities that exceed many $2000 products.”

Notebookreview.com: HP Pavilion dv2 Review, Jerry Jackson

• “The HP Pavilion dv2 satisfies an important need that low-cost netbooks never could.”

Tom’s Hardware: HP Launches Pavilion dv2 Notebook for $749, Jane McEntergart

• “At $749 it’s more expensive than a netbook and more in the range of an ultra portable; a great option for those who’ve realized that a netbook won’t cut it when it comes to anything more than classes, business trips, Facebook or browsing.”

The feedback wasn’t perfect, and that’s expected, as some raised points of question about the dv2’s battery life and fan.

So, all in all, a very good showing for the HP dv2 in regards to the Blu-ray experience, HD video capability, gaming experience, and content creation capabilities; all in a new category created by AMD and HP. The affordable ultrathin. And it’s nice to know that we weren’t the only ones extolling the virtues of the dv2.  The best part about it is that AMD’s ultrathin platform roadmap only begins here, and it even gets better, in the form of the “Congo” platform planned for release in 2H09.  I will see you then!

Note: Blu-ray is optional

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Can an ultrathin notebook be sophisticated, simple, and not cost an arm and a leg?  After using the new HP Pavilion dv2 for a few months, I would say, “yes”.  Since I did my first blog on it back in January I even found some new tricks with the HP dv2.  I was also amazed at how many ways the dv2 exceeded some of the specifications outlined in my “My Perfect Mini-Notebook”.  Finally, I was surprised how much more I could do with the dv2 when compared to some of the pricey $2,000 ultraportables.

HP dv2 (.9" thin) next to BlackBerry Bold

For The Record

I have a mixed family of systems from many manufacturers.  I use these to help with my day job. (No, I don’t blog or tweet for a living. J ) I also want to say that I have been immensely impressed with many of those $2,000 ultraportables on certain usage models like basic couch web surfing, writing emails, and social media sites.  Finally, I am not a mainstream user; I am a media geek and a mid-range gamer.  I do many things most non-geeks won’t do.

HD Video

• Blu-ray: My dv2 came with the optional Blu-ray drive.  It’s simple; plug the drive into one of the 3 USB ports, pop in a movie, the HP player pops up, and watch it. Some of the pricey ultraportables don’t even support Blu-ray or come at an immense price adder.

Blu-ray drive next to a Blu-ray case

• HD video off hard drive: I wrote earlier on the fun and implications of the new breed of inexpensive HD palmcorders.  Whether it’s the Kodak Zi6 or the Flip Mino HD, which capture video at 720P, or the Sony Webbie, which captures video at 1080, I can play these files back flawlessly on my dv2.*  I use Cyberlink 8 playback these files and my CPU utilization is around 35%.  In my personal experience at home with one of my ultraportables, CPU utilization sometimes ran as high as 75%.

Inexpensive HD Palmcorders at 720P or 1080P under $200

TV Connection

• Single HDMI cable: I connected my dv2 to my TV and got digital video and digital audio.  Why?  My family and I like to watch Blu-ray movies and Hulu together on a 60″ display, not 12″.  Many advanced users are doing this today and our research says more and more people are doing this.  Why?  It’s one cable and they can get content on their PC they can’t get on their TV.  Many of the current HDTV models even feature an HDMI port on the side panel to facilitate this usage model.

HP dv2's HDMI port for one cable digital video and audio

To accomplish this on some of the pricey ultraportables, a user could be required to buy additional cables and adapters, increasing cost and difficulty to setup.  Would your wife prefer one cable or five cables in the living room? 

Real Games

• ATI Radeon ^TM HD 3410 graphics: It’s generally understood that typical netbooks cannot play “real” J games well, and some say they aren’t intended to.  The dv2 can because it has discrete graphics that you might expect to find in a larger, more expensive notebook.  Not only could I play mainstream games well like WOW and Spore, but I could also play first-person-shooter PC games like Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty 4, albeit at lower settings than I could on an ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 Series card.  The fact that I can even play these games is impressive.  Some of the pricey ultraportables have Intel integrated graphics that may struggle to effectively play real games at a level I prefer to play.   Ian McNaughton will be covering gaming and the dv2 in depth in a later blog.

3G Connectivity

• Integrated 3G: My HP dv2 came with 3G support capabilities, built-in!  All I needed to do was remove the battery, plug in my AT&T SIM card, run HP connection manager to authorize my card (one click) with AT&T, and I was surfing in my car (while my wife was driving, of course). Alternatively, with some of these pricey ultraportables, I needed to plug in a relatively large external dongle into the side USB port.

HP dv2's Built-in 3G

The alternative 3 G dongle, NOT Built-In

Memory Card Connectivity

• SD card: The dv2 has a built-in memory card slot for devices like digital cameras and video cameras.  It supports SD, MMC, MS/Pro, and xD.  I take my pictures and videos, pull out the SD card from my digital still camera or video camera, and transfer it to the dv2.  With some of the pricey ultraportables, you might need to buy an external SD card reader. By providing a built-in card reader at no extra cost, the dv2 may be able to save you time and money.

HP dv2's built-in memory reader

I like my expensive ultraportable for basic couch web surfing, writing emails, and social media sites.  For more sophisticated tasks, I prefer my HP dv2 ultrathin notebook over my expensive ultraportable.   It’s sophisticated in that it I can play HD videos and Blu-ray movies, play “real” games, and connect with 3G, yet it is simple enough to quickly connect what I want, when I want it, helping me save me time, hassle and even money.  Oh yeah, and did I mention that you may even be able to buy two HP dv2’s and some Blu-ray movies for the price of one of those expensive ultraportables?

* Standard HP dv2 screen resolution is 1280 x 800; 1080p playback is possible when connected to an external 1080p display.

It has been nearly two weeks since AMD engaged the community to ask for their feedback on how the industry should evolve notebook battery life metrics. I have received many questions on where folks can send their feedback and follow the discussion.

Below I have listed some key destinations for discussion.

AMD Blogs

• Nigel Dessau’s high-level notebook battery life blog : Objects in the Toolbar May Be Further Away Than They Seem
• Hal Speed’s detailed notebook battery life blog: There has to be a Better Way

Press and Community Discussions (sampling)

• Slashdot: AMD: ‘we’re not entirely honest’ about batteries
• Engadget: AMD proposes new laptop battery life metrics, Intel is like “whatevs”
• TweakTown: AMD wants to talk battery life with Intel
• The Inquirer: Intel: consumers not bright enough for discussion
• Chris Brogan: An Important Conversation About Conversations
• Icrontic: A Look at AMD’s daring Social media Strategy
• Hot Hardware: Why Are Notebook Batteries So Misleading?
• Wall Street Journal: AMD: Why No One Believes Estimates for Laptop Battery Life
• Tom’s Hardware: AMD: Let’s Revamp Laptop Battery Metrics
• PC Pro: AMD admits industry “not entirely honest” about battery life
• GadgetSteria: “We Lie so you’ll buy our products”
• Notebooks.com: Time for More Battery Life Metrics
• PC Authority: AMD: ‘we are not being entirely honest’ about battery life
• InformationWeek: AMD Proposes Better Battery Life Tests
• Technology Blog: AMD Wants to Revise Laptop Battery Metrics
• TechSpot: AMD calls for new battery measurement standard
• IT Pro: AMD executive admits the industry is “not entirely honest” on the subject of battery life
• Fudzilla: AMD tries to spark a “false battery-life” discussion. Intel doesn’t.
• Thinkpads: AMD Calls for new battery life standards
• The Independent: Why don’t batteries last as long as they’re supposed to?
• Uber.la: Battery Life: Does Anybody Really Care What Time It Is? – Until Their Laptop Goes Black?

Or, of course, you can use Twitter, but be sure to use the #batterylife hashtag so people can easily follow.  You can also follow the “notebook or laptop battery life” discussion on Twitter here.

In the next few weeks we will be organizing all of the inputs and will share these with you in an organized fashion. We will also be soliciting feedback from our customers. Until then, keep the conversation going! Unlike other major technology companies, we believe that blogs are good forums to have these conversations, and gauging from your responses, I think a great many of you agree.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Low-priced, 720P HD pocket camcorders (palmcorders) are gaining market momentum and I believe consumers are drawn to the value proposition of low cost, high quality, portable, and convenient video capture and playback. As these devices proliferate, it leaves me contemplating how consumers will respond when they discover just how many of these notebooks or netbooks can’t effectively play back that content. Whether or not low end notebooks or netbooks were designed to do this isn’t relevant, as a recent NPD blog posting (citing new research) may suggest.

The Cameras

Let’s start with the cameras. I evaluated three different models, Flip MinoHD ($179), Kodak Zi6 ($148), and the Aiptek 1080 ($159). These cameras capture HD video at 720P resolution and 30-60 fps at around 10-12Mbps, which I consider mid-level HD video. Compare this to your typical Blu-ray movie peaking between 20 to 40 Mbps.

Compared to higher end HD camcorders priced into the $1,000s, many features have been removed like branded lenses, large magnification, optical image stabilization, night vision and auto-focus, just to name a few.  In comparing between HD pocket camcorders, the differences are found in battery life, image capture quality, external display size, memory upgradability, and physical size.

Pervasiveness

To quickly gauge pervasiveness in the U.S., I sometimes use Best Buy shelving as a proxy indicator. In my last trip to my local Best Buy, these new class of cameras had 7 slots of shelf space, which is significant. Some models that use the lowest-cost clamshell packaging are even sold at Wal-Mart and Target next to $20 JPEG picture key chains and USB flash drives. In addition, many influential bloggers are picking up on these new HD cameras, which is sometimes a good indicator of future popularity. Amazon.com is an “OK” indicator and these new HD palmcorders are relatively high in sales rank.

The Problem

As I see it, the problem is simple…. videos from these new cheap cameras won’t play well on many of the new inexpensive net/notebooks. If new research from the NPD blog is a future indicator, most consumers won’t know the capability tradeoffs between netbooks, low end notebooks and full capability (HD capable) notebooks. This could spell some real disappointment for users who may expect decent playback. In my testing on a typical netbook or real low end notebook, I get around 7 fps – close to a slide show. Think of it this way – the HD palmcorder is smaller and cheaper than any netbook. Is it logical to assume the consumer will know that the video from the palmcorder can’t play on the bigger, more expensive netbook?

Different Solution Approaches

I suggest there are a few different ways that OEMs can solve these problems. They can:

1)    Provide greater CPU power to decode the 720P HD video.  This may also increase the heat, the fan noise and lower the battery life as well. (High end dual core CPU)

2)    Provide an effective graphics solution that efficiently decodes, filters, and color corrects the image. (i.e: AMD 780G, ATI Mobility Radeon™3000, and competing solutions)

3)    Provide a special decode chip that’s expensive and bounded to specific software. (i.e: discrete accelerator)

AMD’s Approach

Our approach is simple: apply the most efficient silicon to the challenge.  In this usage scenario, the most efficient way is to decode the HD video with the GPU. Inside the GPU are special silicon blocks and special quality filters that are optimized for this function. We call this our UVD or Unified Video Decoder. It accelerates decoding of VC-1, H.264, and MPEG2 video and offloads the CPU for other tasks. UVD also applies quality filters against the video to make it look better, when using a supported player like Cyberlink 8. The result is amazing.  Very low CPU utilization, keeping the system cool and very high quality image thanks to the filters provided by ATI Avivo™ technology.

Implications

If you accept that users will increase their consumption of HD video on their notebooks, disappointment for many will follow with low, ~7 fps HD experience or apply an appropriate GPU to execute the task. Another alternative is to invest resources educating consumers on the difference in capabilities between netbooks, low end notebooks, and fully capable notebooks. With the economy and budgets the way they are, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Real-World Efficiency in Action

I want to highlight my favorite example. The new HP dv2 notebook (based on AMD’s “Yukon” platform technology for ultrathin notebooks) uses a superscalar AMD Athlon Neo ™ processor paired with ATI Radeon™ X1250 integrated graphics and optional ATI Radeon ™ HD 3410 discrete graphics to deliver not only full frame-rate HD video from these new HD palmcorders, but also higher end Blu-ray movies.

Conclusion

AMD has already anticipated the importance of HD video in multiple forms: low cost HD pocket camcorders discussed above, Blu-ray movie capabilities, and of course, some downloaded content.  And we have responded with technologies that are in-market today.  Big question remains: where does that leave netbook owners who expected their netbook to work with their even-smaller and less expensive HD palmcorder, even if that was “never the design intent”? It leaves them stranded on a non-HD island. Hopefully they have a second HD-capable PC at home, but if the NPD data is an indicator, they may not….

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2009/01/22/the-significance-of-hd-palmcorders-to-netbook-and-notebook-design/feed/ 4 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2009/01/06/the-magical-amd-yukon-based-hp-pavilion-dv2-ultrathin-notebook/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2009/01/06/the-magical-amd-yukon-based-hp-pavilion-dv2-ultrathin-notebook/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:49:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2009/01/06/amd-yukon-hp-pavilion-dv2-ultrathin-notebook-netbook-neo.aspx There has been a considerable amount of interest and debate surrounding mini-notebooks (aka “netbooks”), ultraportable notebooks and standard, full-size notebooks. Netbooks sure have come a long way since I first blogged on my experiences back in May. My first configuration had a 7” display at 840×480, 8GB storage, a tiny keyboard, Linux and was priced at $499. Netbooks have changed considerably since then and I think it is safe to say that “more” is what consumers demanded. It is commonplace now to find 10” display at 1024×600, 160GB storage, larger keyboard, Windows XP and priced from $389 to a whopping $789. I have tested now 9 netbooks and clearly see their plusses and minuses, and yes there are plusses. :>

In the background of all the netbook debate, AMD quietly announced the “Yukon” platform for ultrathin notebooks. We wanted to provide something different, something more. We wanted to provide a rich entertainment experience at an affordable price.

So when I got the chance to play with a real, live Yukon-based, HP Pavilion dv2 Entertainment ultrathin notebook, of course I jumped on it, and wanted to share those experiences with you. Because the unit is a prototype sample and isn’t expected to be released until March, I won’t be able to share everything with you, but I will share as much as I can.

The Basic Specs

• AMD Athlon ^TM Neo processor
• ATI Mobility Radeon ^TM HD 3410 discrete graphics with 1080P HD video capability and HDMI-out
• 12.1” LED BrightView display
• Optional external Blu-ray drive
• Integrated webcam
• Nearly full-size keyboard

UPDATE 3/26:

• 0 .93in thin and 3.8lb, varies by confuguration
• Hard drives up to 500GB

Beauty Shots

The HP dv2 looks great and feels like a real notebook. The attention to detail was obvious, in opposition to me who couldn’t get his head out of the way of the picture above.

Front

Back

Left





Right

I cannot share the exact size or weight specifications at this time, but I can show you proportionally how it compares size-wise to objects I am sure you are familiar with.

HP dv2 and U.S. dime

HP dv2 and a BlackBerry Bold

HP dv2 and 10" Notebook

HP dv2 and Mac Air

I had a very enjoyable web experience with the HP dv2 due to many reasons, but three really stand out: the 12.1 display at a nice resolution, a large trackpad with large buttons, and the large keyboard.

On displays, the higher the resolution, the more information you can fit on a screen. The larger the screen, the better you can actually see it. The dv2 combines a large 12.1 screen with 1280×800 resolution. When compared to netbooks, the viewable image area is 45% larger (versus 10”) or 80% larger (versus 8.9”).¹ Not only is the viewable image area larger, you can pack 67% more information on the screen.² That’s a big difference. The best way to describe it is to show the difference. I did a Google search on “AMD Turion”, went into “Shopping” and then into “Show grid view”.

12.1" HP dv2

10" Netbook

8.9" Netbook ; 10" Netbook ; 12.1" HB dv2

HD Movies and Video

High definition video is where the HP dv2 absolutely shines, as I not only did I play 1080P Blu-Ray movies with ease and quality, but also played HD video files from the new generation of pocket HD camcorders.

You can get an external Blu-ray drive as an option that’s about the same size as a Blu-ray case. I really liked the drive as it was very compact, matched the design and size of the notebook, and was powered by only one USB connector, unlike many others you can get in the after-market.

I also successfully played HD video files at full speed from three of the latest pocket HD camcorders. You can buy these cameras from multiple sources for as little as $119 and I see them slowly taking shelf space at retail. This usually is a proxy for real sales and popularity. I tested video files from the Kodak Zi6 (720/60), the Aiptek HD (1080/30), and the Flip MinoHD (720/30) using Cyberlink PowerDVD 8. The dv2 played 720 and 1080 video without a hitch, AND with low CPU utilization. As a comparison, the netbooks played the Zi6 720 HD video at approximately 7 frames per second, according to QuickTime’s Movie Inspector.

The final video clincher for me is the external HDMI port. Forget about 12.1”……. try 52” or 120”, just connect on HDMI cable and you have HD video and audio pumping into your compatible TV or receiver.

Gaming Experience

You would expect the dv2 with the ATI Radeon Mobility 3410 discrete graphics to chew through all the “casual” games like Sims 2, Lego Indiana Jones, and Spore at high settings…. and it did. Also, I tested higher end games like Fallout 3 and even Left 4 Dead. While I would recommend to a hard core gamer an ATI Radeon™ 4000 Series graphics and even multiple ATI Radeon graphics cards using ATI CrossFireX^TM technology for these intense games, I could play them relatively well at 1200×800 resolution at lower quality settings. I was really surprised how playable Left 4 Dead’s first scene was.³ Oh and watch out for the exploding bile man, he is a killer.

Summary

I cannot wait for the HP dv2 to be available in March of this year. It adds most of my personal must-have features in my “ideal ultrathin entertainment notebook”. Features like the 12.1” display, HD video playback, ability to play real games, HDMI out, and a larger keyboard. This supports all my ultrathin notebook needs for casual games, Blu-ray movies, HD video and of course, the web. Is this what you want to see in a Yukon-based ultrathin notebook? I would like to know.

Notes:

1) Resolution: 1280×800 pixels= 1,024,000 pixels; 1024×600 pixels= 614,400

2) Viewable image area: 16:9 (1.78:1) native mode. 12.1”= 61.95 sq in; 10”= 42.63 sq in.; 8.9”= 34.32 sq in.

3) Left 4 Dead at “low” settings.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

In Nigel’s latest blog, he gives the big picture of what the new AMD Fusion campaign means to our customers and business partners. Being the new tech lover that I am, I decided to explore the new AMD Fusion for Gaming utility. I‘ll start broad, then get to the juicy details, but first a teaser from my personal numbers: I saw a best-case gaming experience frames-per-second improvement of over 100% using the new utility.

First, as I have covered in previous blogs here and here, for PCs, AMD innovates around usage models. Whether it’s productivity, home media, or playing games, we work with customers, channels, and end users to better understand their pain and pleasure points, apply the right integrated technologies to meet those needs, and then help deliver the complete experience through our customers and channels.

Console and PC Gaming are very important usage models to AMD, and we apply many hardware and software innovations for both “hard-core gamers” and “consumers who like to play games.” Hardware innovations include our ATI Radeon™ HD graphics, AMD Phenom™ and AMD Turion™ processors, and the chipset platforms. On the software side, we deliver drivers and the award-winning ATI Catalyst™ Control Center that lets you tweak almost every aspect of your graphics card with respect to 3D, video, color, power management, multi-GPUs, and display connectivity. Also, AMD Overdrive™ allows you to tune the performance of your CPU, memory, and chipset.

When the AMD Fusion for Gaming development team asked me to try out their newest software creation last weekend, I jumped ALL over it and wanted to share my experiences.

Hard core gamers know that to have the best experience possible, they need a bad-ass graphics card like the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870, a beefy CPU like the Phenom™ 9850 processor, a great performance chipset like the AMD 790GX, software tools like AMD Overdrive and ATI Overdrive™, and as few applications and tasks as possible running in the foreground and background. Historically, even for knowledgeable enthusiasts, this would be a time-consuming process. For the mainstream user who likes to play games, this type of performance optimization was completely out of reach. To solve these pain points, we created the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility.

The AMD Fusion for Gaming utility was designed to optimize your AMD-based PC for smoother, more responsive game play in the latest PC games with the touch of a button; the utility helps achieve the performance previously only available to highly technical enthusiasts. It works by temporarily shutting down background processes and intensifying processor performance with AMD Boost. That means you can keep all the features, tasks, and applications running on your Microsoft® Windows Vista® PC ready when you need them, but turn them off when you are ready to get down to serious gaming.¹

”Simplicity” was the design principle for the utility, but we still let you peek behind the curtains into the advanced interface to change how the utility works. You can customize with user selectable profiles to individually optimize your PC for gaming. Also, you can easily build your own profile and choose exactly what you want disabled for a leaner footprint. If you want to squeeze every bit of performance from your system, engage our most advanced acceleration technologies such as AMD Overdrive, Auto-Tuning and Hard Drive Acceleration.²

So with that long-winded intro, let me tell you what I personally experienced…

Desktop Gaming

I saw a big improvement in my desktop gaming experience using Fusion for Gaming. This was not surprising given I used Expert Profile that initiates AMD Boost, Hard Drive Acceleration, AMD OverDrive and ATI Overdrive in addition to shutting down unneeded services and third-party applications. Playing games just felt “better”. I know that doesn’t sound like science, but real gamers know what I mean. On Call of Duty 4 and Crysis, my system felt more responsive and snappier. I did a few rudimentary benchmarks on these two games using FRAPS, and saw about a 23-29% improvement in frame rates. Using some canned benchmarks, I saw the following:

• 3D Mark: 15% overall score improvement in 3DMark
• World In Conflict: Based on the setting, improvements in frame rates were 55% for the “average” setting, 157% for the “minimum” setting and 116% for the “maximum” setting
• Lost Planet: 5.8% “Snow” and 24% “Cave” scene frame rate improvement

Very impressive, but again, not surprising, given I was overclocking the CPU, GPU, hard drive, and shutting many Windows services, foreground and background apps. I am not a professional benchmarker like Kyle Bennett or Marco Chiappetta, but these numbers make sense given the “feel” of the game. And remember – these are my results achieved on the platforms indicated below – your experience may differ.

Notebook Gaming

One of the things I love to do with my 6 year old son is play PC games. We place a notebook on the coffee table in the living room, plug in two controllers, and go to town. We play games like Lego Star Wars II, Lego Indiana Jones, and IronMan… age appropriate stuff.I would consider this usage model to be about “people who like to play games”, NOT the “hard core gamer”. Surprisingly, I saw some of the largest boosts here. I didn’t expect it because I didn’t initiate AMD OverDrive or ATI Overdrive, just AMD Boost, Hard Drive Acceleration, and turned off unneeded tasks and applications. My hunch is that because it was a 2GB integrated graphics system where graphics shares memory and I run a lot of background tasks, shutting those down really helped. Again, the experience of Lego Star Wars II just “felt better.”

Like the desktop system, I ran some rudimentary benchmarks on the notebook:

• 3D Mark:8.9% improvement in 3DMark
• World In Conflict: Based on the setting, improvements in frame rates were 140% for the “average” setting, 600% for the “minimum” setting and 53% for the “maximum” setting
• Lost Planet: No improvement in frame rates

I didn’t expect to see any improvement, honestly, so I was surprised to see the World in Conflict numbers. Again, my hunch is that it is the memory impact and all the tasks and the applications that were shut down plus the fact that I used a 2GB integrated graphics system. And again – these are my results, yours may differ.

All in all, I was impressed at the simplicity AMD Fusion for Gaming utility brought to my desktop and the improvement to the gameplay. And on the notebook side, I was very surprised at how much it improved my gaming experience and framerates. While not perfect without some glitches as the utility is in beta, I think the AMD for Fusion for Gaming utility pulls together the strength of AMD’s CPU, GPU and chipset franchises better than ever, and pays off on the promises AMD has made to its customers, channels, and end users on the “fused” value of the three components.

You can download the Fusion utility here and AMD Overdrive 2.14 here, and I would love to hear about your experiences.

¹ THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING.

² AMD’S PRODUCT WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER DAMAGES CAUSED BY OVERCLOCKING, EVEN WHEN ENABLED VIA AMD SOFTWARE.

Desktop configuration: AMD Phenom X4 9850 processor, ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics, Foxconn A7DA-S motherboard (BIOS 81BF1P03) with 790GX chipset and SB 750, 1GB Seagate hard drive (7200 RPM), 2GB Corsair XMS2 RAM, ATI Catalyst Control Center 8.8, AMD OverDrive 2.1.4.

Notebook configuration: Toshiba L305D-S5873, AMD Turion X2 RM-70 processor, ATI Radeon 3100 graphics, 2GB RAM, 160GB (5400RPM) hard drive, ATI Catalyst Control Center 8.8.

Applications: GooglePack, Digsby, Tweetdeck, Picasa 2 media detector, Windows Defender, Orb, Internet Explorer 8.0, Windows Home Server Connect, AT&T Communications Manager, CD/DVD Acoustic Silencer and Config Free (On Toshiba)

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/09/17/first-weekend-with-the-fusion-for-gaming-utility/feed/ 3 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/09/02/five-disappointing-days-on-the-road-with-a-cheap-mini-notebook/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/09/02/five-disappointing-days-on-the-road-with-a-cheap-mini-notebook/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:30:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/08/30/five-dissapointing-days-on-the-road-with-a-cheap-mini-notebook.aspx

Over the last 6 months, I have heard a lot of industry insiders vehemently defending the cheap mini notebook (aka netbook) as a great device to travel with given its cost, size weight and applicability to task. I don’t have anything against these new cheap mini notebooks, but I think it is VERY important that consumers are educated to their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and all I see talked about are the strengths, a disservice to consumers in my opinion. I have used five of the cheap mini-notebooks over the last 6 months and yes, there are strengths and more weaknesses compared to an inexpensive full-sized notebook at the same price. I had written a lot in previous blogs on my personal interaction with these inside the home, so I decided to put it to the test outside the home, a contrast to what I had done and written about in a previous blog.

I needed to travel to Florida last week to look for a new show horse for my wife. She is a “hunter/jumper” and competes at the local, state, and national level along with my two young girls. Buying a horse is a very personal activity, and you have very little time to ride and test many horses. It is important to videotape, take still images and be able to share the videos and pictures with the other horse professionals back home in Texas over on-line services like YouTube and Flickr.

I technologically armed myself with the following:

• Aiptek HD video camera ($179) for capturing 720P and 1080P high definition video to view high quality off-line videos
• FlipVideo camera ($159) for capturing lower-resolution, easy to upload to YouTube and will also convert to the new “watch in high quality mode”
• Kodak V1253 ($175) digital camera to capture high quality 12MP 16:9 stills
• MSI Wind U100 ($579) mini-notebook with no mods
• AT&T 3G USBConnect 881 ($149) modem to connect to the internet remotely

The daily regimen consisted of driving a half hour to the horse barn and trying out a bunch of horses by riding them, videotaping and photographing them while taking notes on the pros and cons. At about mid-day, we would load all the content onto the MSI Wind to view and/or upload the content while still at the horse barn. We would do this in the car and on the way home. That’s when some of the challenges started hitting.

1) Extremely Short Battery Life
I only would get 1.5 hours battery life per charge so I was either not able to load the content in the car, view the content I had loaded in the car or had to wait until I reached the hotel to load, view and upload. I suppose I could have bought another $25-50 car adapter, but hey, these are supposed to be cheap mini notebooks, not the expensive, full featured ones, right? Additionally, because I preferred not to upload 15 separate files and preferred one, I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together all the SD (standard-def) Flip videos, which of course wouldn’t last an entire charge and could only be done back at the hotel. Even basic usages like surfing the web at the pool was useless given the low battery life. By the time you would get to the pool, you might get an hour to read the news, get caught up on current events, etc. After that hour, its right back up to the hotel room to plug the unit back in. Forget it, easier to use the BlackBerry.

2) Choppy, Unplayable 720P Video Playback
I like slide shows, but not when myself, our trainer, and I are trying to evaluate a horses timing, skill, personality and potential problems with health and price. I estimate that the 720p video playback on the Wind was operating at 15 frames per second, a slide show. This was MOV files read from VLC player and of course QuickTime. Completely useless 720P video playback with the cheap mini-notebook. I didn’t even kid myself into thinking it was a good idea to stitch the HD files together. Encode would have been painful.

3) Choppy NBCOlympics.com Internet Video and Compromised UI
During the downtime, we wanted to watch some of the events on NBCOlympics.com, you know, with the Microsoft SilverLight experience… I then discovered a new challenge with the netbook’s 1024×600 screen resolution and maybe even with the Silverlight performance on these new notebooks. This may seem like a nit, but a couple big issues surfaced. When I clicked on the left icon “Olympic Sports” many sports icons were cut off at the top. Not real useful or intuitive and not a big deal to everyone, but new netbook and new website, it should work.

On the “Most Watched” icon on the left rail, once clicked, you cannot read the white text at the top of the screen. Annoying.

The worst part was the “As Seen on TV”, where if clicked, you get a bunch of cool videos selected by day. The big problem was that the days were covered by the browsers at the top. See that yellow half moon at the top right? That’s supposed to be a day. You can theoretically pick previous days if you could actually see them……… but you can’t.

I can’t blame the browser, I need to blame the display and controller for not being able to display those vital 168 (768-600) missing pixels. When I could actually get the videos to play, they were hit and miss, most being choppy and pixilated, some very good. The CPU varied between 75-100% depending on the content.

Hopefully others can learn from my latest science experiment….. when in doubt in my opinion, if you want to do ANYTHING other than surfing basic, light websites AT HOME without the bells and whistles, go for the full-size notebook, not one of these cheap mini-notebooks. With any form of decent video playback or any video recoding, even with Microsoft , I wouldn’t, couldn’t recommend these cheap mini-notebooks in their current state and configuration.

I would love to hear your feedback on this or of your experiences have been any different.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Fujitsu Amilo Pa3553 - ZUR48 retailer in Leipzig

Fujitsu Amilo Pa3553 - Volantino Euronics retailer in Italy

Fujitsu Amilo Pa3553 - Volantino Euronics retailer in Italy

Fujitsu Amilo PA3515 - ZUR48 retailer in Leipzig

Acer Aspire 5530G-804G32Bi - Neckermann.de retailer

Acer Aspire 7530 704G32MI - OTTO Versand retailer

Acer Aspire 7530 704G32MI - OTTO Versand retailer

Acer Aspire 5530G-602G16MI - OTTO Versand retailer

Acer Aspire 5530G-602G16MI - OTTO Versand retailer

HP Pavilion - OTTO Versand retailer

HP Pavilion - OTTO Versand retailer

Fujitsu AMILO Pa3553 - OTTO Versand retailer

Fujitsu AMILO Pa3553 - OTTO Versand retailer

HP Laptop on the Move - United Kingdom

HP TX2520E - United Kingdom

HP Pavilion dv5 - United Kingdom Krefel flyer

FSC ZM-80 - Surcouf retailer in France

FSC ZM-80 - Surcouf retailer in France

FSC ZM-80 - Surcouf retailer in France

FSC ZM-80 - Surcouf retailer in France

FSC ZM-80 - Surcouf retailer in France

Fujitsu Amilo PA 3515-001 - Surcouf retailer in France

Fujitsu Amilo PA 3553-002 - Sourcouf retailer in France

HP DV 1005EF - Conforama retailer in France

HP DV 1005EF - Conforama retailer in France

Toshiba 300D - Volantino retailer in Italy

ASUS RM70 17" - Vobis retailer

Toshiba 300D - Euronics retailer

Toshiba 300D - Euronics retailer

Toshiba 300D - MyCOM retailer in UK

Toshiba 300D - MyCOM retailer in UK

Toshiba 300D12I - Auchan retailer in Italy

Toshiba 300D12I - Auchan retailer in Italy

Toshiba 300D12I - Auchan retailer in Italy

Compaq 1311T PC Portatile 15.4 - Auchan retailer in Italy

ASUS RM70 17" - Vobis retailer

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

In my last blog, I talked about some top things to look for in a latest “2nd generation” notebook. Interestingly, no one debated my analysis of the situation. So I will take your silence as agreement with my position! On the other hand, I did get a lot of questions about availability of notebooks built on AMD’s next generation platform codenamed “Puma”, which we launched on June 4. There’s some real excitement about this ground-breaking platform, and so I took a little trip around my neighborhood of Austin, Texas to see what is already available at the local technology retailer. And remember, retail is a good test of availability, because it has the longest distribution chain.

Before I jump into the pics and SKUs, let me give a little background on the “back-to-school” selling season, which varies a bit by region. It’s been about 5 years since I ran the AMD channels group, so I needed a refresh on the BTS delivery dates. I spoke with some of my AMD biz-dev buddies and this is what they told me:

• In China and Taiwan, the “back-to-school” summer selling season starts the first week of June.
• The North America “back-to-school” season starts the last week of June or the first week of July. It starts when the ads start, like Thanksgiving right after Halloween :>.
• In Europe, the “back-to-school” season varies wildly, starting in July in the Nordics and progressively later as you move southward. In some countries, the new models don’t hit until late August or early September. I will attribute that to awesome vacations. : >

The key point here is that the “back-to-school” seasons vary by region and that “Puma” nailed them all. As this article indicates, our competitor was not quite as timely with some of its BTS deliveries…

I live in North Austin, TX, USA and it is literally the “land of retail.” I don’t live here to be or feel cool, I live here because it is a great place to bring up a family. To provide the proper care and feeding to the inhabitants, there are retail stores everywhere. So this weekend, I went on my own “Puma hunt” to really see what was going on. As I noted above, retail has the longest distribution chain and therefore is a good meter of availability. If you can get it at retail, then you can likely get it most anywhere else, like direct or on the web.

Within a few miles from my house, here is what I found. Now remember that these are the posted sticker prices I observed on actual notebooks available in Austin, Texas last weekend – taxes and additional options like extended warranties are not included. And as the retailers themselves point out, these notebooks can be subject to availability and change without notice. But they do tell a compelling story of “Puma” availability:

Best Buy

HP Pavillion TX2525NR at $1,049 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 RM-70 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. As a tablet, you can use it as a standard notebook or flip the screen around and use it as a tablet with pen input. It also came with a remote to control your media from afar, bluetooth and a fingerprint reader. Cool!

HP Pavillion DV5-1004NR at $899 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display, HDMI output, an eSATA/USB combo port, webcam, 4GB RAM, cool new design (the trackpad looks like a mirror) and Microsoft Vista 64. The kitchen sink.:>

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4830 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 14.1″ display, 4GB RAM, 1394 port, Microsoft Vista 64, and webcam.

Toshiba U405-S2852 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Also comes with a 13.3″ display, 1394 port, and webcam.

Circuit City

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $1,049 a tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Comes with 12.1″ display and similar to the TX2525NR above.

Toshiba Satellite L305D-S5881 at $729 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and webcam.

Fry’s

HP Pavillion TX2510US at $999 a 12.1″ display tablet with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Similar to the TX2525NR above.

HP Pavillion DV5-1002US at $949 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra ZM-80 dual core processor and ATI Radeon™ 3200 graphics. Also comes with Microsoft Vista 64, 4GB RAM and a massive 320GB hard drive.

Toshiba Satellite M305D-S4828 at $849 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor ZM-80 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 14.1″ display and webcam.

Toshiba Satellite A305-S6849 at $749 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 15.4″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite U405-S2846 at $699 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with a 13.3″ display and cool new design.

Toshiba Satellite L305-S5873 at $649 with the AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra dual core processor RM-70 and ATI Radeon™ 3100 graphics. Comes with 15.4″ display.

No, these are not typos. Twelve notebooks built on AMD’s next generation “Puma” platform. All available within a few miles from my house and in the longest leadtime channel, retail. That’s not to mention what is available over the web, if that’s the way you like to shop. And these aren’t the end of the SKUs, either. I expect to see more emerge every month.

So it really is “reigning” Pumas! But wait – I also said it was “raining” dogs. By that I mean that during my visits this weekend I saw a lot of “dog” systems out there as well. I won’t say which ones specifically, but to me a system is a “dog” if it has a difficult time playing HD video and games, come chock full of “generic” graphics and “generic” wireless and is poor value for your hard earned dollars. Basically, a notebook which is the opposite of those described in my last blog (and of course the opposite of the “Puma” notebooks listed above).

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/07/21/get-out-your-umbrella-it%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9creigning%e2%80%9d-pumas-and-%e2%80%9craining%e2%80%9d-dogs/feed/ 12 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:40:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/26/3d-for-the-masses.aspx Historically as an industry, we would typically pigeon-hole 3D system capability into the categories of “games”, “design”, or “visual analysis”. While historically that was the case, in my opinion, we are about to experience a serious breakout in mainstream 3D. Many of the planets seem to be aligning on the content, interfaces, devices and back end services to make this a reality. For end users, they need to make sure they aren’t buying systems with under-powered graphics solutions.

One simple example is handsets. Almost every major phone maker has licenses some form of 3D technology for phones. Recent news regarding Freescale, STM, and QUALCOMM exemplify this and gives a sense of the future. The iPhone showed with its 3D (albeit, 2D engineered to look 3D) that the population as a whole prefers 3D. It makes sense, right? We see in 3D, so it makes sense that that we would prefer images that reflect our reality.

There are even more things going on in the PC space. It would make sense given the increase in monitor sizes, display resolutions, and the improvements to the 3D engines on mainstream systems. Larger average monitor size gives you the ability to see more on the screen. If you keep your resolution the same on that large display, everything will look huge. So you increase the resolution to, let’s say, 1920×1080 (1080p). Now you are set … except you need apps where you can actually benefit from the “z-axis”. For mainstream consumer computer users, games are obvious. Outside games, it may not be as obvious.

I have tested a few of these 3D apps and wanted to share them with you. Have fun!

• SpaceTime- 3D web search with its own UI. Images, video, and tabbed browsing. Very useful … I love it.

• CoolIris Piclens- 3D web search, images and video, but start search in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

• Google Picasa- Has a few 3D enabled viewing and organizational capabilities.

• Google Earth- 3D flythrough of terrain, buildings, even galaxies. Also, they just added a Flight Simulator feature which is cool.
• Google SketchUp- Simple way to create and share 3D models … like creating models for your deck, pool, or a home addition. You can embed these inside Google Earth also.
• Microsoft Live Search Maps- 3D terrain, buildings, fly-throughs.
• Microsoft Windows Vista Aero- Interface for Windows Vista Premium, Flip 3D features are most useful with a large monitor.
• Tactile 3D- 3D flythrough of your data on your hard drive and network. Not for the tech weary. Recommend 20″ monitor and above.
• AMD LIVE! TM Explorer- 3D media viewing of music, pictures, videos, and TV.

As you can see, 3D is here and available to the mainstream user. It’s only a matter of time, in my opinion, before every app will be 3D-enabled in some way, shape or form.

As you are selecting your systems, make sure you get enough 3D horsepower to accomplish the right task. We offer many types of solutions at many different price points to boost your 3D mojo, whether they be ATI Radeon^TM solutions for desktop, notebook, workstations, motherboard graphics, and even the Mac!

You don’t need to hear from me on how competitive we are in 3D …. hear it from some select product reviews below.

• HardOCP- graphics cards
• AnandTech- graphics cards
• AnandTech- motherboard graphics
• Tech Report- motherboard graphics

So there we have it …. 3D is becoming more and more important … and consumers are letting the industry know how seriously they take 3D. Case in point? The “Vista Capable” class action lawsuit!

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Day three at Computex comprised of more 1:1 regional press interviews and spending more time, maybe too much time, on the show floor given security booted us out of the facility.

Although I had spent a good part of time interviewing some of our technology partners, it was now our turn to give interviews. The first one was with Bloomberg, and while they would have liked to dig deep into AMD’s financial matters, we confined our discussion to AMD’s products and competitiveness. We also talked with IDG on a variety of corporate areas. I have been meeting with Sumner for years and it’s so nice to catch up with familiar faces.

We also hosted a Japanese press contingent that freelanced for publications including PC Watch and MYCOM Journal The discussion focused on our “Puma” platform, the rationalization behind our AMD GAME!™ and AMD LIVE! ™ programs, and the benefits we believe they provide to different sets of customers. I personally like to think of AMD LIVE! and AMD GAME! as guiding posts to deliver a superior technology platform for mainstream gamers and media mavens. Some may disagree and call it just a sticker program or marketing ploy, but if it can help simplify a confusing buying decision, it’s easy to see the benefit. Again, we in the PC industry tend to lose perspective on the ocean that separates enthusiasts and mainstream customers in how each of them approach a solid buying decision. AMD LIVE! and GAME! fill a void in information availability and help save time and effort for the consumer looking for a great all-around digital media and gaming PC.

The final interview was with Hardware Zone out of Singapore. We chatted a lot about the future, or in my opinion, the questionable future for UMPCs and a lot about the mini-notebook spin and hype at this year’s show. As you know, I spent 30 days at home with a lot of different mini-notebooks, comparing full sized notebooks at the same price point, and blogged about my results here. I just hope that consumers get full disclosure when deciding between a mini-notebook and full-sized notebook at the same price point.

After our 1:1 interviews we met up with GearLive for a chat. These guys are awesome in that they sift right through the spin (B.S.) to get to the heart of the technology and the benefit it provides the end user. I absolutely LOVE that approach and wish more folks would adopt this. You can check out our interview with GearLive here:

…as we discuss the next generation notebook platform.

Jake Ludington from GearLive has great insights on the entire Computex show and he shares these insights on his blog here.

Finally, we met up with AMD’s Jacky Wong to talk about ATI XGP™ technology. This is AMD’s new external PCI Express® (PCIe) 2.0 graphics platform, designed to deliver enthusiast-class desktop graphic performance and true multimedia upgradeability to notebooks. The concept is real simple: If you have a notebook with an ATI XGP Technology external PCIe connector and you want some real incredible gaming performance, plug your notebook into an independently powered and cooled graphics “booster unit”, and you are on your way to gaming heaven. Jacky talks more about it here:

…and shows us a notebook connected to three additional monitors playing some cool games.

As we were giving our final GearLive interview of the show, the lights turned down and security entered our realm, a pretty good sign that it was time to leave. Matt Davis, my AMD compadre of the show, just flipped on the camera and we just started walking and talking, trying to summarize what we saw during the show. You can catch that conversation here.

What a Computex 2008 show…… Puma has been let off the leash and the industry’s cycle of innovation rules over anything else. It rules over spin and the giant blue hype machine… the truth always comes out in the end, or that’s what my grandfather the milkman and Christmas tree farmer told me when I was a mere four foot tall…….

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/06/day-3-computex-the-innovation-cycle-continues/feed/ 1 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:27:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends.aspx

Today was a huge day for AMD which was capped off with the launch of our next generation mobile platform, formerly code-named “Puma”. For me, it was really a tale of book-ends ranging from checking out some of the coolest technology on the show floor to sharing AMD’s innovation vision with Taiwan’s top 100 tech companies.

With so much technology on the floor, I thought the best way to bring you some of the coolest AMD stuff was to shoot it on video and pics so you can see for yourself. There were a ton of our next generation notebook platforms on the show floor with varying configurations. Check out these videos of new notebooks from HP and Acer and MSI. I especially appreciate MSI’s HDMI port so a user can connect their new AMD-based laptop with a single cable to their TV and get great video and audio. On the desktop front, I thought Gigabyte had a very cool Spider platform that you can see here. Not only was it cool, it was water-cooled with an AMD Phenom™ X4 processor and dual ATI Radeon™ 3870 graphics cards in ATI CrossFireX™ mode.

There were also some unique desktop form-factors as well. Acer had a very cool Aspire L5100 SFF desktop, and at less than 1 liter, it was only slightly taller than my business card. I like SFF but I really love big cases, and Thermaltake had some wicked AMD LIVE!™ and AMD GAME!™ chassis on display. You can see all these below.

The highlight of the day was the launch event of our next generation mobile platform. We had over 400 in attendance and from the feedback I received, we hit the mark with our customers, partners, press and analysts. I caught up with In-Stat’s Jim McGregor and asked him his thoughts about the mobile market and AMD’s platform which you can find here:

Finally, if you missed the event live, you can view it on-demand at Mogulus.

My final event of the day was providing the keynote speech to Business Next’s 2008 Taiwan Info Tech100 Award Ceremony and Forum. The forum included high level executives from Taiwan’s top 100 industries and government officials from what was described to me as “The Executive Yuan”. The theme of the entire forum was “exploring the power of innovation “ and covered a variety of topics from strategy to research and development, operating and executive management……the main point being that innovation has been the key point of technology competition with distinguished companies. One of the biggest treats was the greeting from Taiwan’s Vice President, R.O.C., Mr. Vincent Siew. This certainly isn’t something that I experience every day. It was also an honor to speak alongside Mr. Johnny Shih, Chairman of AsusTek, Adam Judd, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Juniper, and Mr. Charlie Lee, Tainan factory director of Corning. They really know how to do big events well in Taiwan and this was no exception. Here are some pics below…..

So there we have it, Computex day two, a day of mobile innovation, and certainly a day of innovation book-ends.

(1) From left to right speakers are Mr. Adam Judd, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Juniper; Mr. Patrick Moorhead, vice president of Advanced marketing at AMD; Mr. Johnny Shih, Chairman of AsusTek; Mr. Charlie Lee, Tainan factory director of Corning.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/05/day-2-computex-innovation-book-ends/feed/ 2 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/06/03/day-1computex.aspx As I said in my previous blog, we are planning to bring you some of the insights from Computex 2008. We wanted to bring it to you in a more multimedia fashion, and it’s just beginning now.

Day 1 was uneventful, with the exception that I somehow managed to lock myself into my bathroom. Some people may have said, “Someone doesn’t want me going to Computex” and stopped while they were ahead, but I am a man on a mission and cannot be deterred. I am no longer in the bathroom, in case you wondered. Thank goodness for bathroom phones. :>

The Computex show floor didn’t open until 9:30 am and Day 1 for me was mostly about show planning and press interviews. I met with Bloomberg, CNET Asia, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Ming Pao Daily News, and the Hong Kong Economic Times for about an hour each. We talked about a variety of items, but one item that we continually discussed was the present and future of mobility. There was a lot of interest in the AMD platform codename “Puma”, but since it isn’t scheduled to launch until June 4^th, I couldn’t divulge too much so we could save something for the grand announcement.

We talked about the concept of these expensive mini-notebooks a lot. It’s so interesting how, in my opinion, every trade show needs to have the “shiny new red wagon”. The irony is that many never gain market traction and either die or are reformed as something else. I was around for the first tablets released on Windows in the early 90’s and someone reminded me about diskless and wireless web tablets (Miro). For this show I am witnessing the feeding frenzy around inexpensive, low performing (versus full size) mini-notebooks. See my comments on those here. Last year at Computex, the big new thing was UMPCs…… and it was very hard for me to find many of them on the show floor this year.

So I did get the chance to walk the show floor for a few hours and it was interesting. It’s like system builder heaven…… chassis, motherboards, cooling solutions, memory, new storage…….. running out of breath just thinking about it.

At this year’s show, among many things, we are bringing out our new AMD LIVE!™ Home Cinema, which in simple words, is a cool reference design for a living room home theater PC. The specific configuration we’re demonstrating at Computex has a couple of cool features, specifically a digital audio amplifier from D2Audio (which hits what some would call audiophile specs) and a new liquid cooling solution we worked on with NoiseLimit Inc. We’re showing how the digital amp and a quad core AMD Phenom™ processor can all live like a happy family together in a VCR-sized chassis. Check out the interview here on the overall specs and benefits. We also were pleased to have NoiseLimit swing by the booth to tell us how they have innovated for the AMD LIVE! Home Cinema program. You can check that out here.

Finally, I took a look around another booth. I will leave it to your imagination as to who’s booth it was. What I saw there was a demo of Second Life and HD running on their new integrated chipset which was too jittery for me to enjoy. I was yearning for an AMD 780G chipset system with a quad or triple core AMD Phenom™ processor around that time. At my house at least I can run full Blu-ray movies with no hiccups at 1080P splendor and play some really good games like HL2 at decent frame rates.

Doing all this on a mobile platform could be even better…..and that’s what tomorrow is about…. i.e.: our next generation “Puma” platform. I will keep you posted…..and as I requested last time and you came through, let me know what you would like to see and I will try to get it on film.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/06/03/day-1-computex-in-the-beginning/feed/ 3 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 08:17:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/13/Thirty-days-with-a-small-amp-inexpensive-sub-notebook-the-minuses.aspx

In my last blog I wrote about my experiences with a $499 Asus Eee PC 8G mini-note and a $499 HP Compaq Presario F756NR full-note and showed some of the strengths the mini-note has versus the full-note at the same price.

Those mini-note advantages come at a fairly major expense, which I will highlight in terms of few very basic usage areas:

• Basic web: The mini-note’s 7” screen size at 800×480 resolution scores high on portability, but unfortunately for basic web surfing, you don’t get a full web page and are forced to scroll to the “right” and “down” to see the relevant web content in most cases. Also, I encountered performance problems when I hit pages that were heavy with Flash, like Disney DXD, a big issue for my household. The full-note’s Flash web pages loaded much faster and the web video appeared a lot clearer. The Presario’s 15.4” wide-screen display at 1280×800 resolution fully displayed any web page I came across, no matter how wide. For comparison, I took some pictures of some popular web sites so you could get an idea of just how much more you can see on the full-note.

FoxNews.com

Disney.com

• Community web: Because many MySpace and FaceBook pages are so Flash-heavy, I didn’t have a good experience with the mini-note on “spaces” that were heavy with embedded videos. In my opinion, videos and responsiveness were sluggish when compared to the Presario.
• Media storage: With a “PC”, most users would expect to be able to save most of their photos, music, and videos. The Presario had approximately 100GB free while the mini-note had around 6GB free, a 16X difference. So what can one store with the additional 94 GB (96,256 MB)? This could store around 25 iTunes movies, 10,000 pictures, and 9,800 songs. (1)
• Basic Music: The Presario has a DVD-RW drive, which means you can rip and burn music CDs. The mini-note doesn’t have an optical drive. If you are an iTunes fan, you are out of luck with the mini-note. Because the mini-note runs Linux, it doesn’t run iTunes or its content-protected music you may have purchased from Apple. If you really wanted, you could buy Windows XP and an external USB DVD-ROM and load it onto the mini-note, but if you did, I would recommend buying more RAM and solid state storage. The Presario with Windows Vista obviously runs iTunes and Windows Media Player and plays it through integrated Altec Lansing speakers.
• Basic movies: Because the Presario has a DVD drive, it could obviously play DVD movies. If you are an iTunes fan, you can also use their download service and watch and store movies. Unfortunately, the mini-note can do neither. I could get some videos on a memory stick and get them to play, but wouldn’t expect a “mainstream” user to be able to figure that out.
• Basic photos: There were major storage challenges as I outlined above for the mini-note. I could basically view photos on both machines but it was much easier to edit on the Presario, like basic red-eye and brightness changes. If you want to look at pictures on a big and bright screen, the Presario wins, if you want to view pictures in an extremely cramped space on a smaller screen, the mini-note wins.
• Basic games: Both notebooks come with basic games like Solitaire, so would be fine for some of the most basic game players. The close comparison ends there. With the mini-note, I experienced jerkiness with kids Flash-based games available on sites like Nickjr.com, Lego.com, and Disney.com. The Presario rolled through the entire sites well. Moving up the gaming ladder, only the Presario can play mainstream Windows-based games like The Sims 2 because it has Windows and a DVD drive to load it.
• Home productivity: If you are comfortable doing your finances through web sites like Turbotax.com, the mini-note is fine. If you want to load Windows-based applications like Quicken and need a wide screen to be productive with multi-column spreadsheets, the Presario is probably better for you. Both mini-notes came with a productivity suite, the mini-note offering OpenOffice, the Presario providing Microsoft Works and a 60 day trial of Microsoft Office Student Edition. Finally, the full-sized Presario keyboard was much more comfortable than the mini-note’s mini-keyboard when writing anything over a page long.

As you can see, users have a lot to think about today when deciding how to spend their $499 on a mini-notebook like the Asus Eee PC 8G or on a full-sized notebook like the HP Compaq Presario F756NR. I believe the mini-note and full-note will both increase in functionality over time and the content will get richer, so this challenge won’t be going away anytime soon. Adding WWAN, a more powerful CPU, better graphics, and better battery life to the mini-note will make it much more compelling choice in the future, but for now the full-sized notebook sure is compelling. New models came out yesterday with larger screens and higher prices and I have a new one on order to kick the tires.

Let me know what you think.

(1) Assumptions: 2 MB per photo, 2.5 MB per song, 2 GB per iTunes movie..

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

]]> http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/14/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-minuses/feed/ 18 http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/13/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-plusses/ http://blogs.amd.com/patmoorhead/2008/05/13/thirty-days-with-a-small-inexpensive-mini-notebook-the-plusses/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 08:22:00 +0000 Patrick Moorhead /patmoorhead/archive/2008/05/13/Thirty-days-with-a-small-amp-inexpensive-sub-notebook-the-plusses.aspx

There has been a lot of excitement around some of the small, inexpensive mini-notebooks out there. One in particular that is getting a lot of attention is the Asus EeePC, with models currently priced from $299 to $499.

The Eee PC sports a 7” screen, is very small and light with a small and fast solid state drive with pre-installed Linux and basic applications. The industry certainly needs some excitement these days, but after using one of these for a few months, I wonder if consumers really understand the trade-offs versus a full-sized notebook at the same price.

I wanted to compare what $499 could get me between a mini-notebook (mini-note) and a full sized notebook (full-note) so I bought a Asus Eee PC 8G mini-note and an HP Compaq Presario F756NR full-note and have been using both for a while.

The mini-note has some strengths versus the full-note at the same price:

• Size and weight: The mini-note is less than half the weight (5.68 lbs vs. 2.02 lbs), less than half the size and fits on any airline tray table I sat in front of. It was really easy to use in my living room on my lap and even the kitchen as well.

• Simplicity: Although the mini-note had more icons off of the main tabs than the full-note, the tabbed environment seemed simpler to navigate. (1) The inability to add additional software could be simpler, I suppose. The other enjoyable thing was the lack of windows popping up telling you that you need to check into every single thing from virus scanners, to firewalls, and software registrations.

• Cold-boot and shut-down: On average, the mini-note took 76 less seconds (171%) from cold boot to internet and took 27 less seconds (338%) to fully shut down. The Presario only took 2 seconds more (33%) to go into standby, but interestingly, was faster from standby to internet by 21 seconds (168%). (2)

In my next blog, I am going to examine some of the big tradeoffs users will need to consider when deciding between a mini-notebook and a full-sized notebook at the same price.

(1) The Compaq had 9 desktop icons and 23 options from start icon for a total of 32. The Eee PC had 45 icons off of the main tabs.

(2) Average of three runs. “Internet” for the Presario was indicated by the globe icon appearing in the systray and the Eee PC by the appearance of the wireless LAN connection icon. “Standby” for the Presario was indicated by the blue blinking power button and for the Eee PC, by the green, blinking power LED.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

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