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AMD Temash tablets showing up
Someone else started a thread about a more traditional 11.6" tablet from MSI, so I won't rehash that. Rather, the occasion for this thread is an interesting device from Hewlett-Packard:
Intel calls the devices "two-in-ones"; I prefer to call them by the more descriptive name of detachables. The idea is that it's a tablet that you can attach a keyboard to in order to make a tablet out of it. It's been possible to do that with tablets for a while, but only with the arrival of AMD Temash and Intel Bay Trail Atom could we have chips that are low enough power to not be awful as tablets, but still have enough performance to not be completely awful as laptops.
HP went large for a tablet, with a 13.3" form factor. But the specs are interesting: it has a quad core AMD A6-1450 APU. That's enough performance right there to run most of the games listed on this site, though often at low to moderate settings. It offers 4 GB or 8 GB of system memory. Tablets rarely have more than 2 GB of system memory: to get more than this from New Egg, the only options are a single last-generation Atom tablet with 4 GB, nothing with more than that, and several versions of a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with 3 GB.
But it's also interesting what HP did with the keyboard. It's not just a keyboard and trackpad; it has another battery inside. HP also offers the option of a 500 GB hard drive in the keyboard, to supplement the 64 or 128 GB SSD built into the tablet side.
As a tablet, it is 0.44" thick and 2.36 pounds. Those are both big for a tablet, but remember that it's 13.3", which is very big for a tablet. Attach the keyboard to make it into a laptop and you more than double both the thickness and the weight, to get numbers more typical of a 13.3" laptop.
Ultimately, I'm surprised to see that HP went that large. Toshiba is apparently also making a 13.3" AMD Temash detachable, though theirs is based on the dual core A4-1200. I don't know that there is much demand for a tablet that big, but as a laptop, it makes sense.
When AMD launched Temash, they noted that the A6-1450 could run at 1.0 GHz or 1.4 GHz, and the latter was meant for situations where the "tablet" was attached to something else to make it into a laptop with fans that would blow across the "tablet" for improved cooling. I assume that some particular OEM requested this--presumably for a device like HP's, but HP doesn't say that they use that option.
Comments
I see that as being a good marketable item,best of both worlds.The only thing that bothers me is the whole multi billion dollar industry built on sending signals through the air lmao.No wonder Jim Balsille was the richest guy and business in Canada for awhile there ,easy to get rich selling airwaves lol.
Now this whole tablet idea is again making added money after selling you the actual product by selling functionality.Now if only the car industry was that smart ,they would own the oil companies as well.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Honestly I don't see the market here. They aren't competing against tablets, they are competing against sub-notebooks -- which is probably why they don't call it a tablet and decided on the term Hybrid. Tablets are moving smaller and lighter - a lot of people are saying the iPad screen may be too big (at 9.7" and right around 1.5lb, the new Air is down to 1lb) - based on the ability to hold it up with one hand and use the other hand on the touch screen. That's why we saw an entire generation with smaller screens that have been successful, and not a lot with bigger screens that have really broken out.
For people using sub-notebooks, why would you ever detach it from the keyboard? It's a neat gimmick - but the screen is too big and bulky to really use as a tablet, and you won't want to use Office or play games without the keyboard attached (ok maybe Angry Birds, but you don't really want to lug around a 13.3" screen that will get about 3-4 hours of battery life** just for Angry Birds when you can play it on your phone all day and that fits in your pocket) .
4-6 lbs... it's competing against something like the Air, at under 3lbs. Sure, you can't detach the screen from the keyboard, and there is no touchscreen, but 4lbs detached, and 6 lbs combined is... not good. Weight is one of the most important aspects of a tablet (you have to hold it with one hand while using it with the other), and a fairly big aspect of a portable computer period. This weights more than a full-blown 15" MacBook pro, heck even in tablet mode it nearly weighs as much as a Macbook Pro -- and while I consider that a light laptop, it's not easy to hold on the edge with one hand... and it's got much beefier hardware (and probably much battery life).
Basically, it makes for a pretty crappy tablet (better than Surface maybe, but that's a really low bar), and for sub-standard sub-notebook.
** HP makes no claims about battery life on their web page, I just made up 3-4 hours because that's a fairly average run time for a portable, but does say it has a 3-cell battery in each "side". If the battery life were good, that number would be plastered all over the place (like it is for Surface RT, but mysteriously absent for Surface Pro).
This isn't saying anything about Temash - AMD may have a great product on their hands, but this particular HP hybrid - meh. Let a lot of people blow money on it during Black Friday because they think it looks cool, and then after they try to use it for a couple of weeks realize exactly what they bought.
This is completely off topic, but this statement piqued my interest.
I thought - of all the crude oil use, how much of it actually goes to cars? Would the automobile industry actually be interesting in owning Big Oil. I thought off hand that fuel oil/diesel would be as big, and maybe bigger, because there are a lot of ships, trains, trucks, tractors, and even electrical generators that all run off it, and there are a lot of those engines and some of those are ~big~ engines that run a lot (basically anything industrial that has an engine runs from diesel, not gasoline).
Turns out, according to the DoE - Wizardry is right. Gasoline is by far the most heavily consumed product made from crude oil:
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=41&t=6
Anyway, back to Temash.
With the dismal failure of Ultrabooks, Intel is pushing "two-in-ones" as the next big thing. New Egg has a number of them for sale, but mostly, the monitor doesn't detach entirely, but only spin around to be on top of the keyboard in tablet mode. That means that even when using it as a "tablet", you get the full thickness and weight of a laptop. And, of course, OEMs did it that way because a 15 W chip in a tablet (which is what Intel is pushing in this space) is a bad idea; rather, they put the main hardware in the keyboard portion, as laptops traditionally do.
Maybe some OEMs will make a two-in-one that is genuinely detachable, like the Microsoft Surface Pro. But if the CPU has go to in the tablet side, I'd think you'd want either Temash or Bay Trail Atom in there, not Haswell. So I'd think that the HP device of the original post has more use than the Haswell-based two-in-ones that Intel says they expect to take over the world: as a laptop, it's functional, while as a tablet, it's not completely awful like Haswell would be.
Even so, I'd think that there would be more of a market for a smaller device: 11.6" at most, and likely more like 10.1". There's no rule that the keyboard has to be the same size as the monitor, and you could have a keyboard cover flip up or something to cover the portions of the keyboard that the tablet/monitor wouldn't. There's really no reason why you couldn't put a 3.9 W SoC into a 10.1" tablet.
Another point in Temash's favor is that, while it's more expensive than Bay Trail Atom, it's still vastly cheaper than Haswell, especially the ULV variants.
So do I think there's a huge market for the HP device or something like it? Honestly, no. But it at least makes for a better two-in-one than what Intel is trying to push. Though that isn't saying much.