Asus Eee PC 1025C hits the FCC (gets torn to pieces in the process)

The Asus Eee PC 1025C is a 10 inch netbook that’s expected to be one of the first mini-laptops to sports a new Intel Atom Cedar Trail processor. It’s due to launch any day now, so it’s not surprising that the tablet popped up at the FCC this week.

The fine folks at the FCC were kind enough to provide a user manual as well as a series of photographs. There aren’t any big surprises in the manual. The laptop will have a screen, touchpad and keyboard… just like every other netbook on the market. But the photos include a few shots of the Eee PC 1025C without its cover, so you can take a look at the wireless card, motherboard, and other components.

There also appears to be an empty PCIe card slot. It’s not clear if this space is reserved for future models which may have a 3G or 4G radio or video card.

There are also a few photos of the power adapter — it looks like Asus has done away with the bulky power brick and separate adapter cable for this model. Instead you have a single-piece power adapter which almost looks like something you’d get with a smartphone rather than a laptop.

This won’t the first Asus netbook to come with this sort of charger — the original 7 inch Asus Eee PC 701 netbook had a similar cable. It typically takes longer to charge a laptop using this sort of solution, but since Intel’s Cedar Trail chips should use less power than most older netbook chips, the new charger may be able to provide enough juice.

Interestingly the Asus Eee PC X101 netbook also includes the same 19v, 1.58A power adapter, even though that laptop has an Atom N435 processor which uses more power.

According to Asus, the Eee PC 1025C should get up to 14 hours of battery life. It will support HDMI output and feature 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, and USB 3.0. The model on display at the FCC has a white lid, but we also expect to see blue and pink models.

Posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011, 4:31 pm by Brad Linder | 12 Comments

drew

“Intel’s Cedar Trail chips should use less platform than most older netbook chips” neat…. can I buy extra “platform” if the included amount isn’t enough or do I have to hope that the new chips really are easy on the “platform” and that Asus has included enough “platform” to keep me going.
Anonymous

I am very pleased to see new netbooks using Intel’s up-and-coming Cedar Trail Atoms being made. The Cedar Trail CPU is marginally faster than the Pine Trail (the current generation of Atoms) N570 while using less power (6.5W vs. 8.5W); its CPU is two or three times faster than the N570.

It appears that Intel is still not interested in making a faster Atom chip; they are more interested in lowering the voltage while having the same amount of computing power. The netbook market has lost its momentum and Intel wants to break in to the currently lucrative tablet market.

Since Intel hasn’t really raised the CPU power of their Atoms, there is a niche for “cheap but more powerful than an Atom”; hence the success of the AMD E-350 (as well as the new C-60, which has more power than the C-50 while maintaining the same power used–9W).
Voyager112

E350/E450 is 18W c50/c60 is 9W
Anonymous

And you’re point?

Cedar Trail D2700/2600 is 10W, N2800 is 6.5W, and N2600 is just 3.5W… All for their max TDP and actual operation can go even lower.
Anonymous

Intel isn’t making its move yet to seriously get into the tablet and mobile markets. It’ll be 2013 when they’ll come out with the 22nm Silvermont that will bring in a complete architectural redesign of the ATOM.

For now Cedar Trail is mainly a manufacture shrink to 32nm, otherwise the CPU is still based on the same architecture as Pin Trail and only benefits from the faster default clock speed.

The N2600 at 1.66GHz performs around as well as the N550 at 1.5GHz, but the N2600 has a 3.5W max TDP versus the 8.5W max TDP for the N550/N570.

The N570 is clocked at 1.66GHz and that compares to the 1.86GHz for the N2800. So performance increase is mainly from the higher clock speed but max TDP only goes up to 6.5W for the N2800. So is still providing more performance while still using less power.

The N2600 GMA 3600 is clocked at 400MHz and provides nearly double GMA 3150 performance. While the N2800 GMA 3650 is clocked at 640MHz and provides nearly triple the performance. Both are enhanced with full support for hardware acceleration and so can easily handle full HD video and adds support for either HDMI or Display port as well as either LVDS or eDP internally.

Neither C-50 or the C-60 should exceed Cedar Trail for CPU performance. Look up C-50 benchmarks and you’ll see they fall below N550. So for that range AMD will have to rely on its far better graphical performance, which even Cedar Trail’s new GMA’s can’t match.

E-350 and E-450 though should beat even the Cedar Trail D2700, clocked at 2.103 GHz. However, those are for the 11.6″ and larger systems. Leaving Intel to hold on to its dominance in the traditional 10″ and smaller netbook range.

Intel is also pushing other new advances to help increase the appeal of Cedar Trail… Intel WiDi for wireless video, along with wireless music streaming, they may be pushing mSATA as they will also start offing the Intel Instant On feature, eDP means they can easily support HD resolution screens, they’ve improved standby times from days to weeks, and a few other added features as well.

So it’s not just about performance anymore and the ATOM line just needs to survive until 2013 for Intel to get their game changer out.
Anonymous

Considering the last ATOM models to provide around actual 10 hours with a 6 cell were the older DD2 single core ATOM models. To get up to 14 hours with a dual core and full HD performance to boot is a pretty noticeable improvement on run time.
Hudu

Any manufacturers making 10 inch notebooks (ie. non-Atom, non-tablet and non-convertible tablet/notebook) for at most $1200 USD? Or is technology and market not there? Thanks.
Anonymous

Panasonic has a few models but I believe they cost more than $1200 and they’re thicker than netbooks.

Ivy Bridge will make Ultrabooks a viable market segment but they won’t go smaller than 11.6″. So you probably won’t see a affordable 10″ notebook until 2013-2014.
Anonymous

This is a really fascinating discussion.

I went over to cpubenchmark [dot] net to look up the passmark scores of Intel’s and AMD’s chips. Here are the CPU results:

AMD E-350 725
AMD E-450 729
AMD C-60 618
Atom N455 320
Atom N570 645
Atom 2800 (projected) 723

As we can see, the 2800 is a slight improvement over the N570, giving us about the same CPU performance as the E-350/450 (which have about the same CPU)

Here are the GPU banchmarks:

AMD Radeon 6290 (AMD C-60) 190
AMD Radeon 6310 (AMD E-350) 204
AMD Radeon 6320 (AMD E-450) 252
Intel GMA 5310 (Atom N455/570) 69

Assuming that the GPU included with the 2800 is three times as fast as the 5310, it will have roughly the same GPU (as well as CPU) performance as the E-350; not bad for a chip with just over 1/3 the TDP.

Looking at these figures, Intel could easily make a cost-competitive chip that beats AMD’s low-cost offerings. However, it would appear that Intel is holding the Atom back:

* The Atom N570 can only have 2Gb of memory. We don’t know whether the N2800 will (finally) increase this to 4Gb (the maximum the C-50/60 support) or even 8Gb (the max that the E-350/450 support)

* It would appear that the N570 has VT-x (virtualization) support; Seamicro claims that it does and people looking at proc/cpuinfo on Linux systems have reported N570 VT-x support. Despite this, Intel’s official product page claims that it doesn’t have VT-x. It seems bizarre to me to have Intel claim one of their chips doesn’t support something it does, in fact, support.

* Intel could make a netbook 8.5W 35nm Atom chip that has more CPU power than AMD’s E-350/450 chips, but this will not be part of the initial lineup.

My sense, looking at this is that Intel doesn’t want to make the Atom as powerful as it could be; I speculate that it is because Intel doesn’t want the Atom to hurt sales of their more lucrative Sandy Bridge and up-and-coming Ivy Bridge chips.
Anonymous

Actually that was the old paradigm for Intel. Both Intel and MS set limits upon netbook specification to keep it separate from their higher end products. Since netbooks are sold with very little profit they had to protect their higher end products profit margins.

However, that was all back when Intel had no real competition for netbooks.

Originally Intel ATOM’s were set on a 5 year product cycle, while their mainstream products were on a 2 year cycle. Cedar Trail is the last of the old paradigm with the intended 5 year cycle.

Starting with Silvermont, Intel will completely re-work the ATOM architecture for the first time and move to a full SoC design. While moving to the 2 year product cycle for immediate integration of Intel’s latest technology.

The presently being released Medfield for example, which replaces Moorestown, is the first full SoC design from Intel. Right now most of their chips are only partial SoC, combining the CPU with the North Bridge and GPU. So like ARM Intel will be developing extremely energy efficient SoC designs.

Incidentally, Intel is also changing its policy because they want to get into the Mobile market and are pushing Ultrabooks to provide the new distinction between the low end netbooks and their higher end products.

All the low end processors are now going to be using Imagination PowerVR GPU’s instead of Intel made GPU’s, being the other big change.

Intel is mainly just waiting for all their productions to go 22nm before bringing in much of the new improvements. Since things like their 3D tri-gate transistors are only practical at that size and smaller. Also Windows 8 is also being waited upon, as the expected update to their Z-Series ATOM processors won’t take place till just before Windows 8 comes out and helps Intel start their push into the mobile market.

Mind on performance that AMD is going 28nm in 2012 (while Intel will only being going 22nm with Ivy Bridge and the other production lines will only update to 32nm) and will have Krishna and Wichita replace Ontario and Zacate. The top tier of which will be a quad core design. So AMD is likely to hold the top performance for the premium netbook range. While Intel will have CPU and run time performance to strengthen their position in the 10″ and smaller range.

GPU performance however is completely dominated by AMD Fusions. Cedar Trail only doubles and triples the performance compared to the GMA 3150. However, the AMD GPU’s are still about double to triple better than Cedar Trail’s GMAs, but this comes at the cost of power consumption and the PowerVR GPU’s were designed for mobile devices.

For example, iPhones, iPads, Sony Vital (aka PSP2), as well as any device using TI OMAP processors (like RIM Playbook, Archos Gen 9 tablets, and the Kindle Fire), all use PowerVR GPUs as well. So while not as powerful as AMD and Nvidia GPU’s, they are very power efficient and provide pretty good performance for the intended device range.

There are also some variables with what will be offered for both ATOM and AMD systems. So it won’t be always a clear distinction of which platform will be the most appealing, but 2013 is when things will get real interesting.
Chris Jones

I wander how good the performance is compared to the AMD Fusion platform..
Emerson Carvalho

hello someone tried install one slot pci-e in empty slot for test with msata card?? i am looking for one old mother board for solder and msata low price for test…

Asus Eee PC 1025C hits the FCC (gets torn to pieces in the process)

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