ExoPC tablet opens up for the world to see
By Joanna Stern 
posted February 6th 2010 5:09PM
posted February 6th 2010 5:09PM
[Thanks, Jean-Baptiste]
posted February 6th 2010 5:09PM
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Still Atom N270 ? They should use N450 at least.
@mianmian
Its enough for hulu..
@mianmian I agree, the difference is only $20 and 74 million transistors....
@mianmian I'd prefer the N450 as well, but its really just a N280 which has negligible performance difference to the N270 processor performance wise.
@Ducman69
But this thing is going to suck power like there's no tomorrow and the least they could do is use the more efficient N450.
@Delta Well, it should be the same as the billion other 9" netbooks running N270s out there. A Dell Mini 9 goes for 4hrs on its 4-cell and the 9" Acer is rated 9 hrs, atlhough that one has a bigol 6-cell battery IIRC, but a non-removable LiPo would be thinner and lighter.
N450 or N470, 2 GB ram, with ION maybe? I could make my own N270/N280 tablet with an old Asus netbook.
@imaredia
You don't want hulu...you want TV shows from the iTunes store
@One Love I thought if you're going independent graphics, you'd want to stick w/ the N280.
@yulebellow
Yeah, I guess you could bittorrent it... oh, did you say iTunes?
@mianmian
Of course they're not going to use the latest and greatest tech inside. How in the world could they sell a new model in 6 months if they do that?
It's called planned obsolescence, and almost every company does it.
Now i have to find mini pci-express 3G modem for T-Mobile... I know it will have bands for ATT...
God, for a moment there i thought that was a usb port equipped iPad in the photo. But for some reason, that's impossible. :). Can't wait to learn about it's windows 7 touch friendly UI though.
@PATRICKmcnicholl Windows 7 is a touch friendly UI, and it auto-enables the features when touchscreen hardware is detected. Putting the screen on 150% helps though if its high resolution. =)
I love it when they take their cases off. That is so HOT!
wow, 945 chipset, never thought i would see one in a new product again. This thing sucks 4 TIMES more power than the flimsy Atom itself, and heats up a lot. And it has one of those tiny annoying fans to boot. These can drive you crazy, constantly coming on and off. N450 at least has the GPU untegrated, and is made using a 32nm process, much better than the relic here.
It has a fan!!! Nooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
All my hopes and dreams destroyed. Another one bites the dust.
Just have to keep waiting for the Nokia Booklet II with 2GB RAM I suppose.
ZOMG it got a FUN in it
@AdmiralKlingon
On second thought, it's a lame pun. Nevermind.
Anybody knows if the blank minipcie slot uses a USB interface or a true pciexpress slot?
IMO, Broadcom HD Crystal would be perfect for this one.
@keplenk You read my mind.
While everyone was looking at the insides.. i was looking at the trippy blue light in the 3rd picture :P
I'm surprised they shoved a fan in there - I hope it doesn't run all the time/isn't too loud.
Otherwise, looks like a nice little tablet. It'll be interesting to see what they can do with the UI...
@MRCUR
It is nearly impossible to passively cool a 945 chipset, especially in such small form-factor device. It will come in handy for your hands in those cold winter days on the outside though, as long as it is not too cold and the battery dies.
@Val The Dell Mini 9 is passive and doesn't overheat when I play Sid Meier's Pirates Gold, ya bloody land lubber... arggh!
@Val What they did on the Dell IIRC was used those sticky thermal pads to make the subframe and bottom chassis a gigantic heatsink, along with lots of perforations for normal convection.
This guy even converted his Mini 9 into a tablet:
http://www.itechnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Dell-Mini-9-Tablet-Mod.jpg
@Ducman69
Exactly, that is why i said "almost" and "this" form factor. I know for a fact that the 945 runs very hot, i have one. Not a dell, but a lenovo, still, it produces the same amount of heat, only in the dell it escapes into the chasis. Don't you burn your palms while playing?
@Val No way, it never gets that hot. O_O
On the Mini forum though there were peeps bitching about crazy high temps, and it turned out an updated realtek audio driver fixed the issue (apparently w/o it was causing something to max out). The Hakintoshes were running pretty warm too, so I'd check yours to ensure your unusual temps aren't a software issue.
@Ducman69
On the lenovo forums there are endless discussions about fan and temp issues. It seems lenovo put it in production with a design flaw and had to raise the heatsink to clear an inductor, using silicone pads to make contact with the chips. However, i run ubuntu, not windows, and it consistently shows 39-40°C, very much in order, going up to 50 under very heavy load (like youtube, which can clog the poor atom pretty bad). Still, being an engadget reader, i actually opened the thing to check if the fan is ok, it seemed a bit loud. And touching the heatsink (it is one common heatsink for both the CPU and 945), i can tell it was WAY OVER 40°C that the sensors showed. My forehead is 37°C, this things must have been over 55°C. As i said, the atom is pretty cold, 2.5W TDP is nothing, it can easily be left without a fan perhaps. But there is no way a sound driver would make the chipset run that hot. It is a simple fact, it is a 9W TDP part, which intel put there because it was cheap and available. That is why the N450 is so much better. After about an hour of work, the area under the heatsink (where the fan grill is) gets really warm, which has made me realize that my next netbook will be something like the marvell prototype engadget showed some months ago. Bye-bye hot intel, helloo cool and power-sipping ARM!
@Val Netbooks don't use that version of the 945, they come with the 6W 945GSE (still sucky, I know), but regardless they idle at small fractions of max TDP ratings.
Theres definitely bigger-badder stuff out, but comparing a 1.6ghz+ hyperthreading cpu/gpu combo to a basically cacheless weak cellphone ARM processor is like comparing a motorcycle to a moped. If you see "ARM" you instantly know it can't be labeled a computer by any stretch of the imagination. Quero mas performance. =p
I'm digging the Athlon Neo in my little HTPC though, wish we saw more of them, its a tick more powerful than the Atom 330, w/ very frugal idle performance.
@Ducman69
I have simply had it with the "performance" of the atom. I don't really care if an ARM equipped device can be called a "computer" either. It suits my needs much better than the powerful atom, which is dog slow. I will take a dual or quad core 1 GHz ARM any day over this thing. Iphone seems pretty snappy, nokia N900 seems pretty good too. iPad is running an ARM core and it is very snappy from what could be seen at the keynote (that we all saw). The demos by marvell at CES showed their processor running 4 1080p streams simultaneously thanks to the integrated coder/decoder, and also showed 1080p and a quake demo running simultaneously without a hitch. So media is covered, browser is there, open office is there, or if not, zoho.com is an option. That pretty much covers all i do on the netbook. Anything more on it is impractical for me. What serious "computer tasks" do you do on a dell mini?
I am wrong about the 9W, must be atom+945, still too much. Compared to a 250 mW max for an ARM.
@Val Are you talking about the 1.2Ghz quadcore ARM? The A4 you're praising is basically an ARM A9, and it has to run at 2Ghz to sneak by the older N270 Atom at its stock 1.6Ghz (w/ pretty much all can run 1.9Ghz fine), yet the A4 is running 1Ghz. So I'm a little confused by the "slow dog" comparison in this context.... *scratching head*
In any case, just to reiterate though, don't get too hung up on max TDP when it comes to regular running. The more powerful processor will amost always be higher, but a faster processor completes tasks more quickly and returns to idle faster. A core2duo, atom330, and atom 230 all have the same idle power draw for example, and the atom330 completing tasks faster than the 230 is actually slightly more efficient in average use (5 seconds full tilt + 5 seconds idle can be more efficient than 10 seconds full tilt on a weaker processor, if that makes sense). Every device isn't running a ULV Core2 or Atom330 though for cost reasons, so always remember to factor in price/performance. =)
Whatever floats your boat, but I personally think a more peppy processor w/ x86 support is pretty sweet, since it allows you to multitask w/ the freedom of a full OS like W7/Ubuntu/OSX rather than being locked into a tiny walled garden.
@Ducman69
I am talking from personal experience, that the atom is slow, and that in benchmarks it cannot beat a 1 GHz celeron. So please do not compare clock for clock. Old P4 processors ran at 3.something Ghz, were very hot, and are slower than core 2 duo at 1.5 or 1.8 Ghz for example (even in single threaded applications). So it is not always about Ghz. Besides, ARM is a completely different architecture, and cannot be compared to a x86 architecture directly. iPad may use a single core ARM, but it is still more responsive than my atom n270 running ubuntu and grilling my legs. Check the technology demos of Tegra 2 at CES and then come back and talk about tiny walled garden, check how it runs the Unreal demo on a chip that consumes 500 mW. Check the demo on youtube by marvel of an ARM Armada running 1080p and quake 3 SIMULTANEOUSLY in full blown ubuntu, and then talk about not having multitasking. And all this as 250 mW single core design. Tegra 2 has 500 mW, since it is a dual core SoC. And most likely ubuntu will be ported to tegra 2. If it is faster than atom in my everyday tasks (and it is), then it suits me better. You may have the freedom to run Photoshop or Maya ot CATIA on your x86 netbook, 90% of the people, including me, will never even try to do that.
just for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t53tvWtV3Y
and check the prototype of the Adam tablet, i think it was running some android, seemed pretty fast to me, not to mention the screen. When (IF) ubuntu is ported for tegra, this will be a very good and competitive offer.
And i am not getting hung up on maximum TDP, I have literally touched the heatsink with my bare hands while it is working, and i can tell you that it is hot, and that at 500 mW MAXIMUM power (ARM has some pretty advanced features to dave power on idle) it is an order of magnitude better than the atom+chipset combo. And i deffinitely don't think there is a point in a new device running 1 GHz ARM that is at 40°C or above.
@Val Cmon now, you're just making up facts. =P
Of course you can't compare clock for clock, and I have said as much. Clock for clock, the Atom is the faster processor against the ARM in question, and I've said as much. It was even on here in Engadget back in the day IIRC regarding when the ARM finally surpassed the N270 in performance, but it takes .4 Ghz on top of the Atom to do so. The A4 is running half that, x86 compatibility aside.
Intel Core architecture is faster than the Atom, clock for clock, no doubt there and never contended. Atom 330s sold for a mere $43 at launch though IIRC, hence why I mentioned having to look at price performance in your evaluation. You expect more from a $500 device to a $300 model. Common sense. Cost aside, I believe the Z series was smaller and more efficient than the N, but you were stuck w/ soldered RAM and such IIRC, but cost aside a =)
Regarding your "personal experience", I don't mean to belittle it versus actual hard data, but you may have experienced some other bottleneck or difference that didnt make it apples to apples. Here is an example of that on startup, application launches, etc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7hc6qZ_PGI
@Ducman69
nice vid, but what does it prove? That Atom is much better than core 2 duo? or that SSD is faster than HDD? Talking about apples to apples? My netbook has SSD, it boots fast, but that is not my problem with it, it is the HEAT and the fact that it really is not that great on battery life, and the Atom is a slow processor. Maybe ARM is not faster in your tests, i think form what i have seen so far, it is better suited for my needs. For me, the x86 compatibility has NO benefits whatsoever in a portable device. I see that you are pretty keen on sticking with it, I am not.
And please, where am i making up facts?
On your price discussion, glad you brought that up, ARM is a lot cheaper than atom, people are talking about smartooks in the range $180-$200, and a complete system similar to the nettops in the sub $100 range. Probably without HDD; but the standard 160 GB is dirt cheap. The tablet above costs $600, the Adam will start at around $300. And i honestly expect more from the $300 one. Applications boot faster, it is optimized for internet browsing, has 1080p decoding/encoding, it runs much cooler due to the power-sipping architecture, which allows it to have the same running time as the above, but with a much smaller battery. And that makes the device lighter. I ask again, why do I need the higher benchmark results of the atom, when in real life it is not faster in my usage scenario?
a tablet with netbook specs....hopefully they can make a quick and smooth touch user interface and make it weigh less than 2 lbs.
Oh, the huge manatees, guts everywhere
Intel CPU/GPU... blah, no thanks... weak!
945express and atom 270? prime candidate for snow leopard / hackintosh I see.
Runs so hot it needs a fan; why not just use the case as a heatsink? Does the atom and 945ex really eat that much juice to require forced air cooling,,,, if so I cant imagine the battery on this thing will even come close to touching the dual core ARM or Pine Trail N450 in terms of performance per watt. Frankly I think that the tablet will be much better when Intel gets down with a 28nm quad core hyperthreading SOC that runs at under 1watt. (2012) ..... :) For now this is interesting and I agree that looking under the hood makes for a good experience~ Green and Black- its like money~ ^^ for full OS support' looks like a touchscreen/ tablet "netbook" like system.
@cosmicinglewood: A fan is totally out of place in a mobile device.
The Pineviews don't need active cooling afaik.
In 2011 the Intel Medfield will be released. If it'll last that long against ARM and the out-of-order AMD Bobcat mobile number cruncher with ATI graphics.
Build one of those based on an N450 with a 160GB or 250GB harddisk, round it off with a 3G modem and you have a new customer.
Would be nice to have this baby dual-boot Win7 and Ubuntu.
3G model is planned for ExoPC Slate after leaving 32 Go Model
and a new picture beside a Netbook in this post in french
http://www.accessoweb.com/exclu-ExoPC-Slate-Un-modele-3G-est-en-preparation_a6088.html