NVIDIA CEO: Netbooks are just crippled computers

I think if you ask most of the people who read this blog regularly, they’ll tell you that a netbook is a small, light, and low cost computer. But companies that make a lot of money by selling state of the art computer components have a tendency to say that netbooks don’t work very well as computers. The latest person with a vested interest in making you believe that is NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who tells Laptop magazine that mini-laptops with the Intel Atom processor don’t run “anything well” from Electronic Arts, Adobe, or Microsoft.

Seriously. That’s what he said. So if you’re running Windows XP, Windows 7, Office, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, or you know, anything from those companies on your netbook you must be in denial. Or maybe by “anything” he meant Photoshop, Call of Duty, and well, yueah, I wouldn’t really expect EA games to run that well.

Of course, NVIDIA is also pushing its new ION platform which will bundle an NVIDIA GPU with the Intel Atom processor and dramatically boost graphics performance. But I’m sure that’s not why Huang is dissing the Atom’s performance.

Interestingly, he does see some promise in the new AMD Neo and VIA Nano processors. And NVIDIA is hoping to extend the Ion platform to bundle NVIDIA GPUs with VIA Nano chips as well as Intel Celeron and Core 2 Duo processors in the future.

Posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009, 5:47 pm by Brad Linder

John Tromp

To me, laptops are crippled with their excessive weight, excessive heat, and noisy/prone-to-fail moving parts.
Many people have little need for graphics horsepower,
and just want the nicest possible lightweight netboook with no moving parts.
Basically, a dell mini 9 with a decent keyboard…
Linc (MonkeyKing)

The profit margins on these Netbooks must really suck to have nearly all the hardware makers and manufactures so scared.

They want to sell Netbooks, but only if people are also buying a new Quad core machine with all the bells and whistles. Heck, the people who make DVD/CD/BD drives must be going nuts, because these Netbooks go out the door without any optical drive at all.
Brad

Yeah and a traditional cheap notebook doesn't totally suck with its pathetic 2 hour battery life. The uni I attended has started disabling and cutting off electrical outlets in classrooms and other places all over campus because everybody is constantly plugging in to keep their massive wasteful laptops juiced for free so they can email, IM, and read MySpace while on campus.
Dean M.

hey Brad, nice job throwing a “that's what he said” in there. Very classy.
Freddy

Does anybody know if there's really any netbook manufacturer with one product in the works with the ION platform in our very near future? If so, I'm willing to wait for it – hate to buy something that becomes outdated in a few months…
aelmrst

I have an Asus Eee 1000H, with an old version of Adobe Photoshop Elements on it; Elements has works well, for what I've directed it to do. And my Asus 1000H does a good job with streaming audio — no visual — from the Web; downloads that were over 50 minutes long ran properly.

But I've had less success with audio-visual programs. I tried running a seven-minute ProShow Gold slide show (including a sound track), but the show stopped about halfway through; the same slide show runs properly on a “full” PC. An audio-visual presentation from another source also ended prematurely.
animatio

yup .. bacause it is NO REAL COMPUTER i run, e.g. (among others) corel draw 10, photoshop 5, some office suits, flash and video producing software on it … and use it as platform for great music synthesizers … some webpublishing and project management aside … it is NO REAL COMPUTER …. but usable with one charge a whole day everywhere i go. only did cost me some 250 bucks, so ……
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http://pixiestash.com pixiestash

He's way off about Microsoft – I'm running XP Pro and Office on my S101 with no problem. And he's completely missing the point of netbooks. They aren't intended for playing graphics-intensive games or doing serious graphic design, although some people do these successfully. Netbooks are not intended to be primary PCs, although my husband's Eee 900 works perfectly that way. Netbooks are meant to be just that — small, lightweight, sturdy, inexpensive travel companions, with which you can surf the net, send email, and do other basic stuff — and netbooks do all of these things perfectly. But of course Huang wouldn't see the value in that.
hmmmm

Same philosophy as the car makers, same results. Super-nerd power gamer PCs are a limited market. I'm sorry, but these computers are for getting email, surfing and playing some basic time waster games like mahjong. Welcome to commodity computers…cheap, portable and almost disposable. No margin for the fat-cats? To freaking bad. Unlike the automotive market they can't hide behind “safety” lobbyists to hold a monopoly and prevent start-ups from fullfilling this unsavory market segment. Adapt or die.
pixiestash

He's way off about Microsoft – I'm running XP Pro and Office on my S101 with no problem. And he's completely missing the point of netbooks. They aren't intended for playing graphics-intensive games or doing serious graphic design, although some people do these successfully. Netbooks are not intended to be primary PCs, although my husband's Eee 900 works perfectly that way. Netbooks are meant to be just that — small, lightweight, sturdy, inexpensive travel companions, with which you can surf the net, send email, and do other basic stuff — and netbooks do all of these things perfectly. But of course Huang wouldn't see the value in that.
hmmmm

Same philosophy as the car makers, same results. Super-nerd power gamer PCs are a limited market. I'm sorry, but these computers are for getting email, surfing and playing some basic time waster games like mahjong. Welcome to commodity computers…cheap, portable and almost disposable. No margin for the fat-cats? To freaking bad. Unlike the automotive market they can't hide behind “safety” lobbyists to hold a monopoly and prevent start-ups from fullfilling this unsavory market segment. Adapt or die.

NVIDIA CEO: Netbooks are just crippled computers

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