Netbooks in 2010: is this the beginning of the end for the laptop?

Can netbooks really topple the laptop? Yes, but not quite yet. When you start to throw more serious tasks at a current netbook it becomes clear that you don't have a fully-capable PC at your fingertips.

It does not, in business parlance: "provide a rich PC experience". But why not?

We can live without an optical drive and even the smaller keyboards and screens are acceptable, but not being able to transcode video in a flash? Come on guys.

Why can't a netbook do all we might expect of a full-blown PC? It's got the processing power surely? Well no, and there's a little more to it than that, however by next year netbooks will be more powerful. Then they'll be able to seriously challenge the might of the laptop.

Whizz for Atoms

Intel grabbed the netbook market by the danglies with its Atom processor. The Atom was designed with low power consumption in mind right from the start and does a good job of it. It currently comes in single and dual core flavours running up to 2.0GHz with a single core and a heady 1.6GHz with two little hearts.

The single core version supplies the processing power equal to a Pentium M class chip running at about half the speed. However, rather than a chip's raw power, netbook manufacturers are more interested in the bang per watt, or more specifically the watts required to complete a task and get back to idle again.

Everything has to be achieved within acceptable power consumption to keep battery life this side of woeful. The Atom dual-core consumes twice the power on full tilt, but, of course, you don't get twice the firepower. You can argue about the validity of certain benchmarks, but you need software that can use two cores effectively to see a decent gain, a lot of the time you'll be hard put to tell the difference when doing typical netbooky things.

The Atom's weak spot has always been the chipsets around it, which are often modifications rather than new designs and consume far more power than the Atom. This is where Intel has been concentrating its efforts recently, especially on the graphics side of things.

Pineview is the result, due for release before Christmas, and is Intel's next gen Atom, armed with the Lincroft microarchitecture. The big change is that Intel has squished the graphics and memory controller onto the chip, reducing the core chips from three to two (dumping the I/O hub) with the attendant reductions in power consumption. Intel says it'll be faster, use less power, produce less heat and use faster memory. Certainly a good start.

Better graphics on the way

How good the graphics part of Pineview is will be of real interest, but it's basically the same as that found in the current Atom-based netbooks: the GMA950 cranked from 133MHz to 200MHz. Earlier this year Intel unveiled the GN40 chipset along with the ever-soslightly- faster N280 Atom.

At last Intel had something better than the GMA950-based systems. You can sit down and watch a 720p video on your netbook. Hang out the flags. It can also cope with 1,080p, well sort of. It can play a broadband-delivered 1,080p vid, but cannot cope with the extra demands of Blu-ray, so no logo.

The problem here is Windows XP, which only has DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0, rather than Vista's version 2.0. Good news? Well you may have thought so, but it hasn't set the world on fire, in fact it has found few takers so far and its days are already numbered.