Whitebook Hardware

Lest you think that the old bugaboos of proprietary notebooks are still with us, know that building and servicing whitebooks is no more difficult—and often easier than—working on a desktop. Good, modern designs, such as all of the current models from ASUS, have the CPU, memory, hard drive, and wireless NIC all accessible via doors in the bottom of the notebook. Building such a whitebook from shell to finished build can literally take five minutes. We've done it here at RAM.

On the other hand, we've also damaged our fair share of whitebooks. Poor or non-existent documentation, seemingly redundant or useless screws, a profusion of different screw types and lengths, panels that don't pop out under the right pressure, heatsinks that have to be jimmied into position with considerable effort, motherboards that make one memory slot accessible while burying the other, and more are all things we've seen in whitebooks and should be indicators to you of inferior design.

Alviso to go A major upgrade from the original Centrino platform, Alviso jumps to a 910/915-based northbridge, complete with GMA900 IGP option, ICH6 southbridge, and the PRO/Wireless network card now supports 802.11a/b/g for maximum compatibility.

Another hot button in notebook design is thermals. Heat directly affects system stability. Components subjected to prolonged heat will fail sooner than those that are cooler, and heat can also impact system performance even in the absence of errors. Heat has long been perceived as the thorn in the side of AMD-based notebooks, and units based on desktop Pentium 4s pay for their blistering performance with blistering temperatures. Effective thermal management requires an ODM with significant design experience. This is not a place where you want to cut corners. Ditto that for vibration dampening and impact resistance. We have yet to see a "ruggedized" whitebook per se, but some clamshells are definitely more solid that others. You can perceive quality first with your hands and then with your eyes when you dissect the unit.

Should whitebooks be just as modular and upgradeable as desktops? You would think so. It would sure make the job of servicing shells much easier and help bring down manufacturing costs owing to industry standard component form factors. However, ASUS's Chen thinks that the channel should only push for non-proprietary parts up to a point.

"We don't want to lose the fundamental benefit of a mobile unit. For many people, the unit they pick depends on the form factor. If they want really thin and light, they want every corner of the notebook optimized. A standard platform cannot optimize every factor in look and feel, size, weight—all those mobile characteristics. Corporate may go to shared components, such as the same battery format, same docking, same optical drive. But for personal use consumers, I think the industry will drive for the optimized form factor and feel. Until the day when we can make motherboards, say, one-third the size of the notebook enclosure, it will be very hard to unify."

Centrino Reloaded

Intel's mobile platform, branded as Centrino, is so ubiquitous and has received so much attention here and elsewhere in the press that we won't delve into a detailed rehashing. You know the essentials: To be "Centrino," a notebook must use a Pentium M processor, a supporting Intel chipset (originally the 855), and an Intel Mini PCI wireless NIC (originally 802.11b). Intel built the platform to be compatible with chipsets and NICs from other vendors, such as ATI and Broadcom, but abandoning the Intel brand component group meant sacrificing the Centrino logo and all of the consumer peace of mind that a $300 million ad campaign could buy.

A sweet Sonoma Intel’s second-generation Pentium M processor steps up to a 533 MHz front-side bus, has an option for 2MB of L2 cache, is built on the 90 nm fab node, and has clock speeds currently reaching up to 2.26 GHz.

The original Centrino Pentium M featured a 400 MHz front-side bus, memory bus speeds up to 333 MHz, integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2, PC Card support, and AC'97 audio. At the start of 2005, Intel released its first major revision to the Centrino processor platform, code-named Sonoma. The new Pentium M chips sported a 533 MHz FSB. Memory now stepped up to 533 MHz dual channel DDR2, a massive step forward if configured properly. The 915 Express chipset boasted a doubling of graphics performance with the integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 900. Serial ATA debuted, as did support for Intel HD Audio, the 2915ABG wireless NIC handled all three major 802.11 standards, and the old PC Card slot made way for ExpressCard based on USB and PCI Express. In effect, this caught up the thin and light notebooks of 2005 with the mainstream desktops of 2004.

The next major jump for Intel mobile isn't expected until Q1 of next year when Yonah, the dual-core Pentium M, arrives. Interestingly, a recent story in the Taiwan Economic News indicated that Intel will position Yonah to displace today's mainstream Pentium D dual-core desktop chips. Given the famous performance of Pentium M, which often outperforms its desktop sibling at far lower core speeds and temperatures, this doesn't seem far-fetched, although Intel maintains that the Pentium D remains firmly on its roadmap. Either way, the story illustrates the the blurring line between mobile and desktop we can expect to become increasingly noticeable in the market.

AMD's Wild Card

Whatever the merits of the Athlon XP-M processor, the fact remains that AMD hasn't had a serious mainstream mobile processor hit since the days of K6. That may change in the coming months when the Turion 64, released last March, gathers steam. Turion 64 is essentially a modified 90 nm Athlon 64, which carries the immediate advantage of some power savings for memory ops since the controller is integrated into the CPU.

Unlike Centrino, AMD does not have a "platform" designed around Turion 64. Depending on your viewpoint, that can be a good or bad thing. The Turion 64 is compatible with products from every major graphic chipset vendor (excepting Intel) plus LAN and wireless products from Broadcom, Marvell, Atheros, and Realtek. That means more flexibility, no penalty for ditching a branding platform, and often better feature performance. Whether that also means a decrease in stability, compatibility, or simplicity of support is worth debating.

No compromises AMD was careful to ensure top compatibility with Turion. Equipped with PowerNow! for battery savings, the HyperTransport-based CPU also delivers NX code support (“Enhanced Virus Protection”) as well as 3DNow!, SSE2, and SSE3 multimedia extensions.

With a finite amount of time and resources, AMD had to split its CPU energies over the past five years between Opteron, Athlon 64/FX, and Turion. Whereas Opteron and Athlon 64/FX arrived to great critical fanfare and glowing reviews, the word on Turion 64 has been fairly subdued. Independent benchmarks run by VeriTest and passed to us by AMD show the Turion ML-40 (2.2 GHz, 1MB cache) outperforming the Pentium M 770 (2.13 GHz, 2MB cache) by only 1% to 8% across various test types. Many reviewers see this and declare the Turion 64 a disappointment because it didn't blow Pentium M out of the water. What they ignore is the fact that, as of this writing, the boxed Pentium M 770 retails for $699 while the ML-40 sells for $525 in 1,000-unit quantities. Even with a 15% markup from volume trays to dealer pricing, that's only about $600 for the AMD part.

We recently had the chance to speak with AMD's chief technology officer, Fred Weber, and asked for his opinion about Turion's lackluster reception.

"We saw that it was absolutely crucial, not only for AMD but really for the industry, for us to hit a home run with Opteron and make sure that the 64-bit x86 architecture and all the software that was needed for it came into existence. It was very important for us to do that. So we put a lot of wood behind that particular ball. In mobile, we of course have to have a very credible product, and I think we put enough behind that ball to do that. It's a product that many, many companies use every day. I think [AMD and Intel] will go back and forth, and we'll both have good businesses in that market."

Read between the lines and we'd guess that Turion most likely received the shortest shrift among the processors since mobile was Intel's strongest suit and therefore had the greatest ROI hazard. All AMD had to do was hit a double to stay in the game, and that's what it did. Other product lines could carry the AMD name to competitive greatness for the time being.

However, Turion 64 has one major advantage over Pentium M.

Turion takes off. AMD’s long-awaited Turion 64 mobile processor is finally shipping inside plenty of whitebook models, and the ability to offer 64-bit compatibility in a mobile PC could be a huge selling point to the right clients.

"Our solution is 64-bit," says Bahr Mahony, division marketing manager for mobile with AMD, "and with the introduction of Windows XP Pro 64-bit Edition, you can take advantage of that OS. Plus Longhorn will be introduced next year. 64-bit has become a critical part of the purchase decision as people hold onto their notebooks for three to four years. The SMBs that buy through VARs hold onto their technology even longer."

While still not mainstream, the allure of 64-bit computing should not be underestimated for two of the key groups AMD has attracted on the desktop in recent years: gamers and digital content creators. Already, very popular games such as Far Cry and Shadow Ops have 64-bit versions. (For a persuasive look at the difference 64-bit can make in games, see www.atari.com/shadowops/us/amd.html.) 64-bit support is even more prominent in the video, audio, and 3D modeling worlds tied to workstations. Buyers interested in using a low-end mobile workstation without paying for a workstation price might be swayed by the benefits of Turion 64.

Turion 64 is now shipping on whitebooks from ODMs including MSI, Uniwill, Arima, ASUS, Twinhead, and Mitac. These include thin and light designs, a first for AMD. North American distributors include ASI, Avnet, Bell Microproducts, D&H, and Tech Data.

Interestingly, in our conversation with AMD's Mahony, the prospect of an AMD initiative such as Intel's MVAD was never mentioned, although a recent article from ComputerWeekly.com in India has AMD product marketing manager Patrice David noting that the company is "considering plans to roll out a channel scheme where distributors [hold] barebones components for assembled or unassembled whitebooks."

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