The end of the Atom netbook is nigh?

Well, if you believe the FT.com, then this might well be the case, as they’ve written up an article about Nvidia’s Tegra processor and how it’s getting ready to take over the netbook market. We’re not quite sure we can agree, at least not from what we’ve seen so far, but let’s go with what the FT.com is saying for now.

As we know, Tegra is ARM based and there has been a lot of talk recently about ARM and its entry into the netbook market. Tegra might very well be the best option of all the ARM based processors at the moment for a netbook type device because of its graphics processing power, but it seems like FT.com is going a little bit too much on Nvidia’s line here.

According to Michael Rayfield, who is the general manager of Nvidia’s Mobile Business Unit who was interviewed by FT.com, Nvidia is working with its partners on 27 different Tegra based devices, although we’re fairly sure all of them won’t be netbook style devices, despite what the article says.

We can’t argue with the part saying that “Tegra excels in rendering high-definition video as well as Flash animation” as no other ARM based processor can play back 1080p video to our knowledge. However, calling it the “most advanced, ultra-low-power, high-definition computer on the planet” is pushing it, although this was a quote from Mr Rayfield.

On the question of how Tegra stacks up against the Atom, Rayfield replies “Atom is a non-starter [in a low-priced netbook], it’s got a couple of hours of battery life….standby power with Tegra is tens of microwatts, Atom’s standby power is four or five watts. I look at it as a dehydrated notebook computer [chip].  I think the days of Atom and their chipset in netbooks are winding down, because it just hasn’t been a good experience”

At least the FT.com stands up a little bit here and says that “Intel might strongly disagree” and we have to say that so do we. Tegra is very low power indeed, but it’s not x86 for one, which means you can run most operating systems, such as Windows on it. This is a huge disadvantage to anyone that’s used to working with a standard operating system and it also limits the applications you can run on the platform.

On the other hand, Tegra does have very impressive battery life and it can very well steal a chunk of the netbook market away from Atom based netbooks, but it’s for a very different kind of usage scenario. Of course Nvidia doesn’t knock Atom too hard, as they want it to be paired up with its ION solution in netbooks that costs up to $600.

This in our opinion is going to be a tiny market, as regardless of how good ION is, people will consider to go for a thin and light notebook over a netbook in most cases when we hit this kind of price point, despite the obvious advantages that ION offers, such as GPU computing and CPU offloading for video decoding and encoding.

The article goes on to say that Tegra offers between 10 and 20 hours of battery life, although we’re hearing far less from the people we’ve talked to so far, but it’s not impossible to make a device such as this, but then you’re piling on the weight due to a larger battery. Nvidia is still talking about a retail price point of $100-200 which again isn’t even remotely in the ballpark we’ve been told, especially as they expect it to be even less when subsidised by mobile network operators.

We’ll have to wait and see how things play out, but Atom based netbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon from what we’ve seen. Atom and Tegra will be competing head to head, but depending on what you want to use your netbook for, you’ll go for one or the other, as neither platform can replace the other.

Atom netbooks are far more suitable for productivity usage while Tegra based systems are far better at multimedia. The battery life question isn’t really an issue anymore, as you’re getting fairly light Atom based netbooks that offers 10h+ battery life and at least the first generation of Tegra devices won’t last much longer.

It’s going to be an interesting development to watch, but Atom is here to stay, until Intel comes up with something better.

You can find the FT.com article here