Friday, April 03, 2009

Intel: Netbooks not good for multitasking, creating or HD videos


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Intel: " Can I replace my aging laptop with a netbook?

No. A netbook doesn't have the processing power and functionality you'd need to run many of the applications your current laptop supports, even if it's a few years old. The good news is that today's laptops offer more bang for the buck than ever before. You'll immediately reap the rewards of greater performance, quality and reliability by upgrading your system. "

... and looking at the chart, netbooks can't:

- multitask
- create or edit videos or photos
- Encode music
- Watch HD movies
- Run complex office software

Uuuuh.. I have been encoding videos while editing pictures and uploading them. Back at CeBit I edited over 40 videos and all photos on my Eee PC.. And as we know, HD plays fine on any netbook...

Netbook doesn't have the processing power and functionality ???

What do you think? Netbooks are ok for all tasks but are just smaller and less powerful than some laptops?


Netbook vs. Laptop: Which one is right for you?








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31 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not sure if HD plays fine on any netbook. Certainly not flash encoded HD video, but I had problems even with other HD formats. The only HD video I got to work was 720p WMV, I am afraid. But neither can I play HD video on my desktop...

Saperalot said...

I edit Videos also on a Asus 900 and it works, OK faster SSD is always good to have. I whatch Videos while Travelling. So i do all the things i do on my desktop. Overall i say they are much smaller but you can do mostly all you need for mobile computing. I dont understand this words Intel said.

Anonymous said...

netbooks can probably do many of these tasks but at a much much slower pace...

Anonymous said...

Öhm, Intel should know, that the power of netbooks will increase the following years.

If they'd put a bit effort into it, netbook cpu's and gpu's would be powerfull to play HD media and games in mid-details and were also energy safing.

but still...netbooks aren't meant for such things.
They are cheap and used for office and internet.

Anonymous said...

this is the companies fear, that people will find out that they do not need the fastest and most expensive stuff to do most tasks out there.

when that happens, the race will be one of cost, or who can take the biggest beating on margins.

Anonymous said...

wmp :-(
mpc :-(
real player :-(
qt :-(

All of the above formats faster/smoother than than ever? Yes - vlc 0.9.8a :-D

morganj said...

"can't run complex office software" or "create or edit videos or photos"

Yea right, i'm running office 2007 and creative suite cs4 on my m912 netbook and on my m704 umpc (via c7), with no problems. It seems that Intel and others are not really aware of what is possible with the atom.

carmenara said...

You might take a look at the eeeuser dot com forum community, where thousands of us employ a variety of netbooks for daily productivity, entertainment (including 3D gaming) and even as media servers.

It is thanks to Intel's own foresight that Atoms and even Celerons in our netbooks are able to perform virtually all mundane computing tasks. Perhaps, they forgot that just a few years ago, a Pentium III 1ghz with 512mb RAM is considered cutting edge.

Netbooks have surpassed that level of computing power, and with the next generation of chipsets, processors and video hardware, will remain very competitive ultra-mobile platforms.

A lot of people have wondered why we spend over a thousand dollars on niche market hardware, or powerful C2D systems, and never utilize their full potential in everyday usage conditions.

Thus, for such users like myself, who are no longer interested in playing the latest games, or simply wish an ultra-portable computer system to live with, a netbook represents not a secondary, low capability system, but a full fledged personal computer in its own right.

As for multitasking, I'm now running 2 IM clients over 3 networks, a web browser with an attached Java chat room, Media Player Classic with a 720p movie, and a download manager retrieving 4 large files at once over a HuaWei E220 3G modem.

If I'm bored I'll simply put the movie aside and fire up some of my favourite classic games including Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries, Street Racing Syndicate or Tribes 2.

Remember, the Intel Atom has dual execution units, making it a minature C2D in its own right. It handles multitasking very well - and even resource intensive antivirus programs like AVG8 never bogs down because of that.

So, I would definitely love to support the netbook industry, especially where they will become much more powerful later this year with the introduction of the GN40 graphics chipset. Netbooks are built for efficiency and every last bit of performance out of a limited-size and budget platform.

I call that innovation, and the way of the future.

Donna said...

Intel just wants to promote the devices that give them the best profits. They had better watch what they have to say about one of the few aspects of the industry that is showing an increase in sales.

Otherwise, all people will remember will be bits and pieces of announcements like this. Such as "Intel", "netbooks", "can't multiask". Then they will shop for netbooks ith Intel's competiors' chips inside, and Intel will make ZERO profit from te sales.

Anonymous said...

its funny to see Intel scared shitless of their own creation...

Anonymous said...

totally agree with intel, but there are two different points of view:

1) intel makes netbook chips and laptop chips. they surely don't want to lose market on the money bringing laptop chips. netbook chips (atom) kills intel.

2) my eee 901 can do lots of stuff, also simultanously, but waaay slower than my now sold tx2120us HP tablet. there everything just happened, on my netbook i really have to wait. try to run music, open 20 tabs in firefox with javascripts and encode/decode music or videos, zipping etc. on my tablet i just did it, on my eee 901 i have to think about what doing first and can drink a coffee.

intel is not saying netbooks are not capable, but they are really worse in performance than laptops, how can anybody disagree!!!

Anonymous said...

That sort of marketing talk by Intel makes me anger! They are strait out lying.
Sure laptops may be a few seconds faster when single tasking in large applications especially when compared to a the cheep netbooks with slow SSDs but the reality is for the majority of people all over the world are using with older computers slower than netbooks and are doing just fine. Use a little patients and save your money for something you actually need! (ie software)
Netbooks are completely capable machines for Office 2007 and light CS4 work. Even high-def (720p) encoding is fine. There is a psychological tendency to think that bigger is faster. Try plugging your "cheep" netbook into a 22 inch LCD, gaming mouse, keyboard and 5.1 surround system add and auto-focusing web cam. Then sit back and be amazed at the speed!
Really INTEL! Your costumers are not for the most part interested in 3D rendering or PC games. (Many people use consoles for that.) Yet popular titles like World of Warcraft and Starcraft work smoothly on these "internet-only" netbooks.
Once word gets around about how much these mini-pcs can do, your margins Intel are DEAD!

And don't even try to think of Nvidia ION's probable results...

Long live the efficient Netbook!

/rant>

confictushome said...

My Mini9 is a great tag along, but I do prefer to run my vaio 17" or my desktop with a 20". I do find that I have to wait for pages to load in firefox. There is noticeable startup lag on every application, If I where willing to spend an additional 100-200 on a bigger faster SSD and $20 on ram, it may well be on par with my vaio. The screen is tiny and nothing will fix that, the 10 or 12 with a faster ssd and more ram cost as much as a "regular" laptop, and won't have a core cpu. And don't get me started on how crappy the intel graphics are, heavy flash bogs it down.

That said the 4 hours I can run on the Battery of the Mini9 sure makes it a lot more of a "mobile" computer than my aging Vaio that gets about 60 minutes of battery life.

Anonymous said...

i did all this stuff years ago on 800 mHz 256 mb win xp systems (and sometimes still do) ..... yes, i know - peoples memories are short.

and well just a question aside: what the hell do you with playing 1080y vids on the small netbook screen? to lazy to convert the stuff?

Anonymous said...

As long as a netbook has a proper, fast SSD, there are no serious bottlenecks (unless you need more resolution than 9-10 inches currently offer).

High bitrate Full HD won't play on a netbook without hardware decoding (WMV showcase videos do play, but not H.264).

Anonymous said...

Intel is exactly like the US auto industry. The auto industry had too much reliance on big, powerful, and expensive trucks and SUVs- and not enough foresight to recognize the fact that consumers don't have the money and/or confidence to put a large investment into the latest, greatest, biggest, baddest thing out there.

Intel is seeing that consumers are settling for netbooks just like the auto industry was seeing how consumers were settling for 4-cylinder compact economy cars. Try this comparison:

GM: "Can I replace my aging SUV with a sport compact?

No. A sport compact doesn't have the engine power and functionality you'd need to transport passengers like your current SUV does, even if it's a few years old. The good news is that today's SUVs offer more bang for the buck than ever before. You'll immediately reap the rewards of greater performance, quality and reliability by upgrading your vehicle."

What's funny is the fact that for most Americans, a cheap compact car can do almost everything an SUV does, just not quite as well. Saying that a netbook can't multitask or edit movies is like saying a compact car can't carry passengers or can't haul cargo. I've edited movies on my 900HA and I have hauled cargo around in my Ford Focus. It certainly can be done, and people do it all the time.

James said...

Well, there are limits to netbooks! For example, you can't effectively edit AVCHD 1080p video on anything less than a 2.66MHz quad-core. Otherwise the system is simply not reactive enough to play smoothly without pre-rendering (especially if there are a couple of overlaid video tracks). But the important thing is that I have a desktop for that kind of thing. And, for virtually everything else, a netbook is fine.

Some upcoming netbook changes will close the gap with laptops:
- replace the large bezel on most laptops with a slightly larger screen (eg most existing netbook lids could probably fit in 1" bigger screen);
- incorporate dual cores Atoms;
- pre-install Windows 7.

Anonymous said...

Frankly, I find the attitude against netbooks ludicrous not to mention HIGHLY INACCURATE.
I have a top-of-the-line laptop over 3 years old that was nearly $2000 at the time of purchase with every bell and whistle that could be had and I have an Asus 1000HA EeePC I bought back in January.
The only difference I've noticed between the two?
My top-of-the-line gaming monster got 1 and 1/2 hours out of it's battery when new and weighs in at 7.8 lbs.
My Asus goes for almost 8 and at 3.2lbs I can carry it around all day.
Believe me, I've done the side-by-side test on every program I own and the worse that can be said is that for my MMO's, the Asus takes 1-2 SECONDS longer which is MORE then paid off because my monster takes a full 2 MINUTES 13 SECONDS LONGER TO BOOT!!!!
These guys are either on the greatest hallucinatory drugs ever devised by man or lying.

Anonymous said...

My HP Mini on XP and Atom with 512K RAM and 8 GB SSD runs HD video, in, I think 320 pixels, better than my 4 year old Pentium 4 desktop with 2 GB RAM and a Radeon 9250 graphics card. I know my desktop is crap by current standards, but it just goes to show that a netbook under $300 is more than adequate for basic functional needs, even for viewing smallish HD video on a smallish screen.

If you check google on the Atom 270, it has pretty good hyperthreading, and typically beats a Pentium 4.

I guess Intel should have disabled some features on that mighty little Atom.

Anonymous said...

Clearly they're not fooling most of JKK's readers. But they're PR pros whose job is to lie if it will fool enough people to generate some big-iron sales.

Anonymous said...

There's this weird pro-netbook defensiveness that swings in two opposite directions. When someone points out that netbooks may be less capable than laptops, we get both of the following reactions sometimes simultaneously:

1. a blog post like this one where the blog post author talks about how he does with his netbook all the things you're not supposed to be able to do with them.

2. a derisive blog post like http://www.gottabemobile.com/2009/03/28/david-pogue-compromises-with-netbooks/ that basically boils down to "Of course netbooks don't have the power and functionality of a laptop. Why are you surprised by this and why is this a bad thing?"

Anonymous said...

thats funny i haveà u820 and vista and when they say that i can view hd videos ok they know that atom its a shit in vista and i can,t see videos smooth but i made the test with xp tablet edition and sorprise hd full screen with any problem flash video full screen without problems its a shame that the voice reconizer in spanish it,s no avaliable but the other things like multi task without ploblems

JLM said...

Oh, great.
That´s the reason they will NEVER accept Nvidia ION platform...
That platform will became Netbooks into "laptops for creating".
Come on INTEL!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Netbooks can play many 3d games. The Eee 901 and up i know they can play n64 emulators and older games such as Half-life 1, and Max Payne 1 & 2 without a hitch. And they can even play a few newer games like Spore and Halo: Combat Evolved. Netbooks are for me, small and portable with long battery life (on some, like the eee 901) and play light games. Fun little devices

Anonymous said...

Intel is really wrong. That's why I prefer AMD. ;D


Netbook has by far better size:power ratio than laptops. Most of the netbooks are cheap as hell too.

HD video.. It does play very well. If it isn't playing well, change codec.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget JKK has the Runcore SATA PCI-e SSD in his Netbook.

An SSD upgrade is the way to go. Once you have a Runcore SSD in these machines they are very very fast.

Anonymous said...

Haha, their C2D sales must have dropped dramatically.

Anonymous said...

From what I can see, no-one is listening to Intel or any of the other critics. Three people in my family have now ditched aging & bulkey laptops for 2 x EeePC 900HA and 1 x EeePC1000H. I didn't hear anyone complaining. It's a little odd that Intel in their chart missed 'office applications' as all the eees run MS office without a hitch.

Intel - Epic fail!

calexandre said...

Eat this Intel!

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc35/sivarja/ePC/multitaskeeepc1000h.jpg

I'd like this picture shown to every Intel executive out there who would diss my beloved netbook. There are many like it and this one is mine, bone stock and runs whatever I want, no lag at all. Hi res video on the back, too.

Linkiboy said...

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/555/revisedchart.jpg

Fixed.

As you can see, having a netbook is actually more advantageous, after you factor in the awesome factor.

Anonymous said...

hey everyone im glad to hear that the netbook isnt such a failure as some websites suggest. im personally considering to buy a acer aoa150-1786 netbook. my only delema is about the memory. i would enjoy to have 120gb of memory to store all my stuff but then again most people are thrashing the hard drives and are saying the ssd is much better and faster. could someone help me decide? how much faster does it get? is the speed difference enough to change the memory from 120gb to practically 8gb plus wutever sd cards you got lying around?

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