PC Trend Observed at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2008 - UMPCs in the limelight, permeating HD trend, and gaming PCs in pursuit of performance
PC Trend Observed at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2008
UMPCs in the limelight, permeating HD trend, and gaming PCs in pursuit of performance
The PC market is still enjoying the high growth rate at 14.7% year-on-year on the world shipment number basis in 2007. The growth driver of the PC market is evolution of technologies surrounding the PC. From COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2008, a tradeshow of the PC technologies and products held in Taiwan from June 3rd to 7th, 2008, three evolutions of the PC have emerged. The first is evolution to a small-sized and low-price notebook PCs, so-called UMPCs (Ultra-Mobile Personal Computers); the second to PCs capable of HD (High Definition) videos; and the third to gaming PCs in the pursuit of graphics performance.
Major UMPCs All Together
EeePC that ASUSTeK Computer Inc. sold in Taiwan in October 2007 sparked the UMPC boom. At COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2008, Taiwan's major PC vendors such as Acer and Gigabyte Technology besides ASUSTeK displayed UMPCs all together (Figure 1). ASUSTeK released and demonstrated a new version, Eee PC 901, for this year's COMPUTEX. The display is enlarged from 7 inches to 8.9 compared with existing EeePC so that the width of a Web browser fits into the screen. The price is $NT 16,988 (about US$550). As the OS, either Windows XP or Linux is available.
Also, at Intel's booth, UMPCs of those companies occupied a booth space as they are equipped with the latest low-power microprocessor, ATOM, which Intel developed towards low-priced Internet PCs and consumer electronics (Figure 1). Meanwhile, in the booth of VIA Technologies, a Taiwanese chipset manufacturer who develops and sells a low-power processor, C7-M that is ATOM's competitor, UMPCs equipped with C7-M accounted for about a half of their booth space (Figure 2).
UMPCs are positioned between smart phones and notebook PCs. They are targeted towards the "mobile Internet" market, which is very likely to grow in the future. UMPCs per se have been there for the past few years, but it is the low-priced Eee PC (only US$399) ASUSTeK started selling last year that ignited the current UMPC wars. The price below US$500 awakened the demand for 2nd PCs. Furthermore, Intel and VIA have commercialized low-power and low-cost microprocessors, accelerating this trend.
HD video decoding as the center of functional enhancement
The 2nd evolution is to make a PC HD-capable. Each company spared a large booth space for demo PCs that can play back HD videos from notebook to desktop. For example, Acer entitled "Sensational Cinema Intensity" and was playing back high-quality cinema videos on A8920 notebook PCs. The 18.4-inch display is of 16:9 aspect ratio and full-HD specification with 1920 x 1080 pixels. The company displayed also desktop PCs such as Aspire M5201 that is equipped with the latest AMD 780G chipset with HD playback capability made by AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). They are equipped with HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) terminal, a digital audio/video input/output interface for consumer electronics and AV equipment to smoothly transmit high-quality audio/video to the display or TV set.
As to the HD trend for the PC, it was significant that the "next-generation DVD format war" came to an end. In the future, it will be indispensable for the PC to feature HD video playback capability as Blu-ray Disc contents become popular. Both Intel and AMD are putting a great effort into chipsets equipped with HD-playback capabilities. At Computex this year, Intel released G45, and AMD released M780G, both of which are capable of playing back HD video.
At present, the center of such enhancement is decoding function for HD videos. It is sufficient if you just watch Blu-ray contents with the PC. In the future, however, it is expected AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) camcorders, capable of recording HD video, become popular, with such choirs as editing HD videos and converting from H.264 to MPEG-2 or VC-1 becoming more common. In this case, in addition to HD video decoding, HD video encoding will need to be enhanced. There are still few chipsets that have enhanced encoding feature. Over time, video-processing chips with HD video encoding/decoding will attract public attention.
The 3rd evolution is the high-performance gaming PCs with enhanced graphics. Acer demonstrated Aspire PREDATOR that was announced in May 2008, and ASUSTeK, too, displayed ARES CG6155, both of which are gaming PCs (Figure 3). Aspire PREDATOR uses Intel's Core2 Quad for the CPU and NVIDIA’s nForce 780i SLI for the GPU. ARES CG6155 also is equipped with a cutting-edge CPU and four GPUs.
Gaming PCs consume hundreds watts of power, which is extremely high. It is because they use the latest, very high-performance CPUs and GPUs. For example, Intel's Core 2 Quad CPU has the TDP (Thermal Design Power) close to 100W. The TDP of the next model GPU, GT200, by NVIDIA is expected to be reaching 250W. In the COMPUTEX exhibition hall, motherboard manufacturers were competing to show off the flashiness of the cooling devices for GPUs and CPUs.