CES 2013 is all over for another year. We weren’t there but thanks to live streams, press releases and news from other sites we were able to relay all the important news for you and had the time to add a little more analysis that we would have done had we been there.
In the Ultrabook space 7 new products were shown and 7 products got an update and there was a lot of related technology news. Read on for the 23 most important Ultrabook-related news items of CES 2013.
AMD based ultrathins haven’t exactly been raining down on us over the last twelve months but HP have definitely been a strong supporter. HP is continuing with it’s Sleekbooks and will add an AMD-based Pavilion Touchsmart Sleekbook 15 to the range.
Perfect. One of the first (if not the first) AMD-base ultrathin is on the starting blocks, and it’s built inside the same casing as the Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook that is also getting the Ivy Bridge upgrade. This is the perfect opportunity to get side-by-side testing done. How does the Samsung Series 5 NP530 perform against the $100 cheaper Samsung NP535? We can’t answer that question now but it won’t take long to get some figures an feedback.
We’ve just finished watching the AMD press event from Computex which was 100% about AMD APUs. Trinity extends down to Ultrathins and we even saw a dockable hybrid demonstrated.
Update: Video of Compal Hybrid below.
In a well executed press event by AMD in Tapei today, AMD pushed ultrathins and hybrids as two of the form factors made possible by AMD APUs, Trinity and Brazos 2.
John Taylor, Director of Global Product Marketing at AMD, just published an official post over at the AMD blog entitled: ‘Does an Ultrabook™ by any other name smell as sweet?’ In it, Taylor takes issue with Intel’s Ultrabook campaign and wishes that Intel would let OEMs alone to make their own decisions.
The popular Lenovo S205. An 11.6” lightweight notebook with AMD Fusion. A thinner, more powerful version of this with SSD and a $500 price could raise eyebrows!
AMD could be getting ready to show its first Ultrathin as early as January, a report from The Australian says today.
AMD have told the publication that they had held discussions with a number of manufacturers about Ultrathins and one of them was “particularly advanced.”
Interestingly, AMD aren’t giving any specifications out.
This is the seventh report on sizing trends in PCs below 12 inch screen size (and above 5 inch) appearing in the German market through the popular price comparison engine, Geizhals.at (*1) The last one was done in Feb 2011. Once again we’ve seen a big jump in overall numbers. The 7″ segment and 10″ segment have grown while the 11″ segment has shrunk. The 10″ market dominates more in this report than it did in the report of Feb 2011 although there is a clear trend occurring in the 7″ space where growth in products has occurred in all of the last 4 reports.
The number of choices in the mobile screen space (above smartphones) has grown over 2x from approx 240 SKUs to over 630 SKUs.
The big jump in numbers is clear to see from the top graph. Total numbers jumped by 115 with most of that growth coming from the tablet form factor and the 10″ netbook/notebook sector. Big increases in the 7″ tablet sector (now the biggest number so far) and a reduction in the numbers of 11″ devices mean that percentage distribution has changed a lot. The iPad2 introduction caused the growth in the 9″ segment.
In the 10″ netbook space which accounts for 75% of the 10″ category there are now 18 AMD C-Series SKUs and 315 Atom SKUs. 64 of the Atom-based devices (20%) use the high-end N570 version.
In interesting statistic is that 1 in 5 devices on the market in the 5-11″ segment are from ASUS.
Across all categories, ARM-based CPU designs account for 23% of all devices, almost exclusively in the tablet sector. It will be interesting to see how that changes over the next 2 years with the introduction of Windows for the ARM processor.
In terms of weight, the tablets mean that the average weight of a device has gone down. 28% of the devices weigh under 1KG.
Meego appears for the first time along with the cheapest and lightest netbook ever launched. The ASUS Eee PC X101.
Chromebooks did not enter the sub 12″ screen space yet. (Acer 700 not available in Germany)
Sandy Bridge (2nd Generation Intel Core CPUs) enters the sector with 14 SKUs from 5 devices.
Total number of tablet form-factor devices: 193 (30% of total)
Cheapest devices:
In terms of netbook trends, the search and news volumes seem to be steady after their large drop in Q1 (see Google Trends.) Numbers of devices in the market have increased and obviously the introduction of Cedar Trail in Q4 will create news, products and searches in the netbook category. The trend for netbook products, news and search is going to be level-to-rising for Q4 That may, or may not, relate to sales numbers.
In terms of handheld PCs, our focus here at UMPCPortal, it’s a sad story. The online market is now almost totally clear of 5-9″ X86-based Windows devices. It will be interesting to see how the Windows 8 market affects this in 2012.
Warning: Please remember that this is a single data-source analysis of what is happenning today, in the German market. This is not a complete market analysis report. You may use the data and images but please also reference this article which includes this warning.
*1 Based on SKUs, not model families. Data taken from Geizhals An English language (and UK market) version of Geizhals is available at Skinflint.
There’s an interesting post over at the French site blogeee.net today. They’ve put the latest AMD E-series Fusion platforms up against the new 1.8Ghz ‘Cedar Trail’ N2800.
It’s not exactly fair to be comparing the E-series with Cedar Trail like for like as they have vastly different thermal characteristics but there’s an interesting result to be seen in the GPU test results.
The new PowerVR-based graphics in the Cedar Trail platform are turning in 3x what the N570-based platform does. That’s excellent news.
As far as raw CPU power goes the tests don’t show any comparison but I would expect the dual-core Cedar Trail platform at 1600mhz to be about the same as the E450. The 1.8Ghz N2800 should turn in better CPU performance.
With the N2800 having a design rating of 6.5w and the E-450 at 18W you can see which one has more chance of appearing in smaller, lighter devices. One wonders if it might be a better choice than Oaktrail for Windows tablets.
http://www.blogeee.net/2011/08/amd-e-450-intel-n2800-premieres-mesures-de-performances/
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