CES 2010 Wrap
Where Vendors Gather, Worlds Collide
By Roger L. Kay
By now, most industry followers and leaders have reported exhaustively (and exhaustingly) on the
cacophony that is CES, and as reticent as I am to add to the noise, I thought I’d offer my hopefully
different perspective to the flow.
As usual, I didn’t get to the floor except by happenstance when I had to stomp across acres of
displays to get to a meeting (next year, NVIDIA, get a booth closer to the front!). So, I cannot
confirm myths about fantastically high resolution, huge, and cheap displays, in-car entertainment
systems, the thousand new eReaders hitting the market, or a billion other things I’m sure were
there.
What I can talk about is the evolution of the busy space between the phone and the PC, that
formerly Sargasso Sea that now represents one of the most active and unstable areas in the
computer industry.
Netbooks, of course, were out in force. Intel recently refreshed its Atom chip with the Pine Trail
update, and many vendors showed new products based on that. But the dynamics of the
“tweener” market have shifted — in fact, are shifting on practically a daily basis — as if someone
pulled out the divider between the x86 and ARM markets, and left the two to mix into each other’s
traditional territory at will.
Long-time x86 player nVidia, whose main business is selling graphics chips for PCs, has pivoted
neatly over to the ARM side with its Tegra line. The company introduced Tegra 2 at the show,
modeling it in a small slate tablet, among other form factors.
The small tablet itself is the outgrowth of a number of trends. The smallest I saw up close, the
Dell prototype, has only a five-inch screen and can still fit neatly in a pocket. Since the ARM camp’
s traditional markets include smartphones, connectivity is key, and many of the little tablets had
3G built in. Another dynamic is the advent of the Apple tablet, the putative iSlate. As Apple tried to
get upwind of CES — a favorite tactic — by confirming to the Wall Street Journal that, yes, indeed
there would be a tablet, and soon, so the CES crowd, given enough lead time, was able to tack
upwind aggressively and put out reference designs and working models ahead of Apple’s actual
announcement. One has to wonder, if Apple were not aiming at this market with its trademark
accuracy, whether the rest of the industry would care so much. One could even say that renewed
interest in the category is a direct result of Apple's vapor threat to enter. The company has been
able to define, by its absence, a market. Very strange! Nonetheless, all this ferment makes life
interesting.
Between Atom- and ARM-based designs, practically every OEM had something to show in the
tweener department. Atom-based netbooks represent the defending champions while ARM-
based smartbooks are coming on as challengers. In addition to my traditional x86 clients, I found
myself talking for the first time to firms like Qualcomm, Freescale and ARM Holdings itself, and
having conversations on a different level with x86 firms that also license ARM, like Lenovo and
nVidia.
The smartbook wave appears to have legs, inasmuch as a wave can have legs. The power
characteristics of ARM are still attractive relative to x86, even with the latest generation of Atom. In
the next round, Atom will evolve a yet better power profile, but at the same time, ARM is improving
performance, which in any event is less of an issue as computing shifts to the cloud. Smartbooks
also have a cost advantage at this point of perhaps $100 or more.
Meanwhile, on the software side, Qualcomm offers with its silicon Brew Mobile Platform, a free OS
(and development environment) perfectly capable of running a smartphone-level device such as a
smartbook. Google’s Android is interesting because it comes ready made with its own
ecosystem of apps and services. Microsoft’s Windows is way out of the running in this market.
Slates are rather experimental, but the form factor has evolved substantially since Microsoft first
focused energy on making the tablet a horizontal market in 2002. Now, they're aimed at
consumers rather than commercial verticals like health care and insurance. Slates have, in
multitouch, a much more intuitive interface now. They're smaller, thinner, and lighter. They are
lightweight and smartbook versions have extra long battery life thanks to ARM's power-sipping
architecture. And with phone-like connectivity, they can take advantage of increasingly popular
cloud computing. The new generation of slates will come to market this year.
Another dynamic behind this trend, and one not typically visible to the general public, is the
evolution of Globalfoundries’ business. After having won its x86 bus license in the settlement
between Intel and AMD, Globalfoundries will be able to spin itself the rest of the way out from AMD,
giving it flexibility to work with a variety of customers and to manage its financial structure
according to its best interests. The company gained an important customer last week when
Qualcomm signed up for major production. Rumors are that, with the huge Qualcomm win, which
came at the expense of TSMC (Qualcomm’s traditional supplier), capacity in Globalfoundries’
Malta, New York, facility is already spoken for — even before the fab is built! And the company
hinted that it may be able to announce another large customer in the next couple of months. Even
as Intel has begun shipping 32nm parts this month, Globalfoundries indicated that it will ship
28nm parts in the forth quarter this year, which will give the company a half-node lead on Intel for
about six months in 2011 (Intel’s 22nm node is expected in 2H11). Thus, the ARM camp has
acquired a top-tier supplier with leading-edge capabilities.
And in 2011, AMD will come out with its Fusion parts, which will blend on a single die all system
elements: processor, core logic, graphics, and I/O. In the tweener space, AMD is currently
championing a form factor it calls the “ultrathin,” which has price and performance just a notch
above the netbook, which itself bifurcates on performance between systems with and without
nVidia’s ION chip. Fusion-based ultrathins could also be contenders by next year.
We don’t yet know where all this will settle out. Will the winner be found among the super-
smartphones, smartbooks, smallish eReaders, netbooks, nettops, ultrathins, or the iSlate? Only
the market knows for sure. Stay tuned, though. Watch this space. It’s bound to be an exciting
year.
© 2010 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
cacophony that is CES, and as reticent as I am to add to the noise, I thought I’d offer my hopefully
different perspective to the flow.
As usual, I didn’t get to the floor except by happenstance when I had to stomp across acres of
displays to get to a meeting (next year, NVIDIA, get a booth closer to the front!). So, I cannot
confirm myths about fantastically high resolution, huge, and cheap displays, in-car entertainment
systems, the thousand new eReaders hitting the market, or a billion other things I’m sure were
there.
What I can talk about is the evolution of the busy space between the phone and the PC, that
formerly Sargasso Sea that now represents one of the most active and unstable areas in the
computer industry.
Netbooks, of course, were out in force. Intel recently refreshed its Atom chip with the Pine Trail
update, and many vendors showed new products based on that. But the dynamics of the
“tweener” market have shifted — in fact, are shifting on practically a daily basis — as if someone
pulled out the divider between the x86 and ARM markets, and left the two to mix into each other’s
traditional territory at will.
Long-time x86 player nVidia, whose main business is selling graphics chips for PCs, has pivoted
neatly over to the ARM side with its Tegra line. The company introduced Tegra 2 at the show,
modeling it in a small slate tablet, among other form factors.
The small tablet itself is the outgrowth of a number of trends. The smallest I saw up close, the
Dell prototype, has only a five-inch screen and can still fit neatly in a pocket. Since the ARM camp’
s traditional markets include smartphones, connectivity is key, and many of the little tablets had
3G built in. Another dynamic is the advent of the Apple tablet, the putative iSlate. As Apple tried to
get upwind of CES — a favorite tactic — by confirming to the Wall Street Journal that, yes, indeed
there would be a tablet, and soon, so the CES crowd, given enough lead time, was able to tack
upwind aggressively and put out reference designs and working models ahead of Apple’s actual
announcement. One has to wonder, if Apple were not aiming at this market with its trademark
accuracy, whether the rest of the industry would care so much. One could even say that renewed
interest in the category is a direct result of Apple's vapor threat to enter. The company has been
able to define, by its absence, a market. Very strange! Nonetheless, all this ferment makes life
interesting.
Between Atom- and ARM-based designs, practically every OEM had something to show in the
tweener department. Atom-based netbooks represent the defending champions while ARM-
based smartbooks are coming on as challengers. In addition to my traditional x86 clients, I found
myself talking for the first time to firms like Qualcomm, Freescale and ARM Holdings itself, and
having conversations on a different level with x86 firms that also license ARM, like Lenovo and
nVidia.
The smartbook wave appears to have legs, inasmuch as a wave can have legs. The power
characteristics of ARM are still attractive relative to x86, even with the latest generation of Atom. In
the next round, Atom will evolve a yet better power profile, but at the same time, ARM is improving
performance, which in any event is less of an issue as computing shifts to the cloud. Smartbooks
also have a cost advantage at this point of perhaps $100 or more.
Meanwhile, on the software side, Qualcomm offers with its silicon Brew Mobile Platform, a free OS
(and development environment) perfectly capable of running a smartphone-level device such as a
smartbook. Google’s Android is interesting because it comes ready made with its own
ecosystem of apps and services. Microsoft’s Windows is way out of the running in this market.
Slates are rather experimental, but the form factor has evolved substantially since Microsoft first
focused energy on making the tablet a horizontal market in 2002. Now, they're aimed at
consumers rather than commercial verticals like health care and insurance. Slates have, in
multitouch, a much more intuitive interface now. They're smaller, thinner, and lighter. They are
lightweight and smartbook versions have extra long battery life thanks to ARM's power-sipping
architecture. And with phone-like connectivity, they can take advantage of increasingly popular
cloud computing. The new generation of slates will come to market this year.
Another dynamic behind this trend, and one not typically visible to the general public, is the
evolution of Globalfoundries’ business. After having won its x86 bus license in the settlement
between Intel and AMD, Globalfoundries will be able to spin itself the rest of the way out from AMD,
giving it flexibility to work with a variety of customers and to manage its financial structure
according to its best interests. The company gained an important customer last week when
Qualcomm signed up for major production. Rumors are that, with the huge Qualcomm win, which
came at the expense of TSMC (Qualcomm’s traditional supplier), capacity in Globalfoundries’
Malta, New York, facility is already spoken for — even before the fab is built! And the company
hinted that it may be able to announce another large customer in the next couple of months. Even
as Intel has begun shipping 32nm parts this month, Globalfoundries indicated that it will ship
28nm parts in the forth quarter this year, which will give the company a half-node lead on Intel for
about six months in 2011 (Intel’s 22nm node is expected in 2H11). Thus, the ARM camp has
acquired a top-tier supplier with leading-edge capabilities.
And in 2011, AMD will come out with its Fusion parts, which will blend on a single die all system
elements: processor, core logic, graphics, and I/O. In the tweener space, AMD is currently
championing a form factor it calls the “ultrathin,” which has price and performance just a notch
above the netbook, which itself bifurcates on performance between systems with and without
nVidia’s ION chip. Fusion-based ultrathins could also be contenders by next year.
We don’t yet know where all this will settle out. Will the winner be found among the super-
smartphones, smartbooks, smallish eReaders, netbooks, nettops, ultrathins, or the iSlate? Only
the market knows for sure. Stay tuned, though. Watch this space. It’s bound to be an exciting
year.
© 2010 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Battle Over 'Tweener' Form Factor Looms
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