It looks like good news this year for consumers and business enterprise IT departments. Expect to see at least 95 new ‘thin-and-light’ notebooks, with about 20 of those ultrathins containing AMD chip-sets, and the remainder branded as ultrabooks with Intel chips. Through much of 2011 industry observers were skeptical that advances in that category would be enough to actually drive sales. Almost all the manufacturers are on board now, and the trend is sweeping across the notebook, laptop landscape. You don’t need spell-check to know that spells competition in anyone's (note) book.

We saw that tidal-wave coming and mentioned that volume sales of thin-and-light, ultrathins and ultrabooks, would re-charge the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, because 90 percent of laptops will be produced in that form-factor by the middle of 2013. Volume production of ultrathins will happen by the end of 2012. Mid-year changes will include even better chip-sets and some models will be offered at a $500 US price-point.


Analyst Deron Kershaw at Gap Intelligence says consumers will care which chip is inside if they are price sensitive, and he also thinks we will see AMD ultrathins as low as $500, undercutting Intel’s least expensive ultrabooks by about $200. At the end of 2011 one Intel-based ultrabook sold for $699 US on a sale promotion. It seems clear that with volume ramping up, that $500 price-point will be achieved on good quality systems.

AMD's solution is the APU, Accelerated Processing Units containing both a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), and a CPU (Central Processing Unit), sometimes referred to as a system-on-chip design. AMD’s graphics processors have, over time, proven better than those made by Intel, although overall their CPUs may be approximately equal, depending on precisely which benchmarks and processors are being compared.

Disruptive Technology?

A sales volume driver for ultrathins, ultrabooks will be the introduction of Windows 8, which will include the Metro user interface (UI). Corporate IT departments will benefit from features such as built-in anti-virus and anti-malware, cloud-based services, a newly re-designed file system, a greatly improved Task Manager, cross-hardware-platform convergence on multiple devices, and IT deployment options.

A report by Daniel Ashdown of Juniper Research found that Windows 8 will be important to ultrathins, ultrabooks sales volume, because of its always-on and connected functionality coupled with extended battery-life management features.

Assessment

Ultrathins and ultrabooks are what 90 percent of notebooks will be in the near future, because they combine the characteristics of a notebook’s larger display, better keyboard, superior processor (CPU or APU), more RAM memory, a solid-state-drive (SSD), and multiple connectivity options, with the netbook or tablet's size, mobility, light weight, and battery-life. That spells both convergence and sales volume, even without using spell-check.