I recently had the opportunity to hear Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, share his vision for portable computing. Nvidia's Tegra mobile chips are in a lot of Android tablets, hitting the market now, and although Nvidia is mostly known for its graphics processors, mobile has become a new sweet spot for this Santa Clara, CA-based company.
While Huang's overall vision focuses on bringing low-voltage, high-speed performance chips to all types of mobile devices, including smartphones (which he calls super phones) and tablets, it's his vision for laptops that I find quite intriguing. His mobile processor roadmap is impressive, and although I can't share the details of this roadmap, it is safe to assume that while these chips are dual-core today, they will scale up to many more cores in the future.
That means we could eventually see low-voltage mobile processors running at speeds of 2 GHz and above in the not-to-distant future. And in many cases, this would include very advanced graphics processing as well. If this is true, it will have dramatic implications for the entire laptop computing market. In less than two years, the laptops we have today could look like clunkers if Huang has his way.
To be fair, all of the major semiconductor companies are chasing a similar goal—to create powerful processors that use very low-voltage. They all want a piece of the mobile market, where 1.4 billion cellphones are sold yearly and it's estimated that as many as 200 million tablets could be sold by 2014. But these chips could potentially impact the more mainstream laptop market too.
When talking about the future of laptops, Huang actually held up an Apple MacBook Air and said "this is what a laptop should look like." He was basically praising Apple's sleek and thin design and making it clear that really thin and really light was much better than thick and heavy. I have been using a MacBook Air for a few months, and personally I agree with him. In fact, I am quite spoiled now. Although I own more powerful laptops, albeit much thicker and heavier, I've found that a great deal of what I need a computer for I can do with my MacBook Air.
Apple is great at dealing with thermal heat issues in small spaces, and with its great eye for design, it has given the market a laptop that is perhaps way ahead of its time. Of course, Apple is way ahead of the market if really thin and light is the future. However, the more I use some of the desktop quality, productivity tools on iOS, such as Pages, Numbers and even Keynote, I really wonder if a MacBook Air with iOS would give Apple another hit product and one that is cheaper then the current MacBook Air. The iPadgets 10 hours of battery life, which is well above any laptop in this ultra thin and light category at the moment, and I assume if Apple's A5 chip was used in a thin and light laptop it too would get great battery life.
Today, Apple uses an Intel dual-core processor and flash memory for storage in its MacBook Air. However, these chips still use too much power to give them the kind of battery life that most people want in a laptop. For years, we used to say a laptop had great battery life if we could use it on a trip from the East to West coast. But today, people want much longer battery life, and another feature that is really critical to the future of portable computers is instant-on capability.
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