Innovations in Notebook Technologies

Technologies that protect your data, balance computing and electrical power, improve productivity and manageability of your notebook are evolving continuously. We look at some recent evolutions in this space

Saturday, March 10, 2007

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Very fast paced developments are happening in the space of technologies that empower a notebook user to perform more tasks in a lesser time and using lesser energy. And these technologies also include a higher degree of data reliability and system stability into notebooks than is available on a standard desktop. Some of these are of course re-invented names and marketing gimmicks, but there are some fascinating new technologies included in every new notebook available today and we take a tour through some of them.

Display
There are three technologies that power LCD screens: transmissive (suitable for indoors), reflective (for outdoors) and transflective (mostly outdoor). All LCD displays use a polarizing film to filter light. The type of film used, can vary the quality of display as well as how the display performs under different lighting conditions. A rough matte finish, common to traditional LCDs, will bounce light off in all directions causing problems with the image's brightness tending to the user's eyes.

LCD technologists are using a chemically treated smooth-finish matte polarizer now to counter this problem and produce better and brighter displays. These new LCDs are called 'anti-reflective' screens.

HP/Compaq's BrightView, Sony's XBRITE and Toshiba's TruBright are all anti-reflective screens. Anti-reflectives have been around since 2003 on Japan-made notebooks. Such displays are said to have the best and most crisp pictures with wider viewing angles (that's a great plus for LCD screens). You can make out an anti-reflective screen from their glossy appearance and very bright displays when you turn them on for the first time-software or hardware controls need to be used to set them to appropriate viewing brightness.

Power savings
Savings in electrical power used by the notebook are of great benefit to notebook users. One of the ways that notebooks save power is by stepping down the power consumption of the CPU depending on how much of it is being used.

This technology was central to processors for the mobile line up (Pentium M, Celeron M and the Intel Centrino platform). Now with two cores in your notebook instead of one, you don't want to suddenly double your power consumption! Thankfully, the updated version of CPU Stepping within Core 2 processors from Intel features an advanced power management technique.

Samsung's 32 GB solid state drive is NAND Flash driven and works through a PATA interface. SATA versions of the drive are expected soon

For instance, in the older processors only some parts of the CPU could be turned off, since there was only one processing core and more than one task would be running all the time. But with two cores on the die, it is possible that an entire core is idle and it can be fully switched off. In the same way, many areas inside the core can also be turned off. For this, the updated CPU programming language introduces many more CPU power states that the OS can use to command parts of the processor to turn off, depending on the load it expects to put on it.

Compute power
In line with the increments in the number of processing cores, notebooks can be very powerful today. We use the phrase 'can be' for a reason.

Simply having two 64-bit cores in your notebook (like with an Athlon X2) does not instantly guarantee you superior compute-power. You need several things to go with that, not the least of which is 64-bit drivers and OS to run it with. Then, your applications must need 64-bit processing to run better.

Otherwise, it is just overkill. That aside, consider what is available in the market. The latest CPU to get off the blocks is the Intel Quad Core (QC). Though we are yet to see a QC notebook, the potential to have four computing cores in your notebook, along with the ability to supplement it with a good graphics system, like the Nvidia GoForce 8800 GTX (if such a model ever becomes available) is too good a deal. For now, a dual core system is the best bet if you want value for money.

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