Discussions

Apple was excited about shipping 10M iPhones.  Interestingly enough, in the same year that Apple broke 10M, netbooks broke that same number.  I’ve seen predictions for 2009 showing netbook sales in the   20 - 30M range and by 2010 we’re looking at numbers as high as 50M.  The platform is clearly viable, which means that it’s time to start talking about roadmaps.

Netbooks, like any other PC platform, are at the mercy of Moore’s law.  Thankfully.  The other thing to keep in mind is that since netbook performance is as low as it is today, the performance ramp should be pretty steep over the next 5 years.

Since netbooks have to be cost and power optimized, I don’t expect to see the usual gains in performance on a given manufacturing process.  It’s each new manufacturing process that will reduce power and die size enough to accommodate new performance features.

Intel’s Atom debuted on a 45nm process and throughout 2009 that’s where it will remain.  I’d expect a 32nm version of it towards the end of 2010, which will almost definitely be all dual-core by that point.

AMD’s approach to the netbook race has been to take an existing K8 core and simply reduce clock speed and voltage enough to make it viable from a power standpoint.  The die isn’t quite as tiny as what Intel has with Atom, but performance should be much better.  Intel could theoretically address the netbook market with a similar approach, leave Atom to smartphones and deliver a special Core 2 based chip for netbooks in the future.  That approach would guarantee much higher performance.

In the next 2 years I’d expect SSD costs to drop significantly as well, which would help to really improve the usage experience of the netbook - currently plagued by very slow hard drives or poor performing SSDs.

The line between netbook and notebook could get blurry before it gets more well defined.  I’d expect that the way many of us use netbooks today, as simply web terminals, could eventually be replaced by a properly designed, lightweight, tablet.  I’ve often referred to such a device as the Star Trek tablet, but what I’m envisioning is something 2 - 3x larger than an iPhone but with the performance characteristics of a netbook.

If that’s how things end up working out then we’d have smartphones, tablets, cheap notebooks and expensive notebooks as our portable computing devices going forward.

Do you see the future panning out differently?  I’m not a fortune teller, so I’d like to hear how you think it’d all work out.