Tablets Killed the Netbook Star?

[Aikouka]

Aren't the PowerVR (and really... the majority of ultra-mobile SoCs) better with video simply because they have hardware-based decoding? I thought Intel didn't add MPEG4 (h264, etc.) decoding until the i-series. Not sure....

I realize that shipped and sold are not the same thing. Apple reports sold and Google and their partners are reporting shipped. That is why Apple has 68% of the SHIPPED market, where if you looked at the SOLD market, that number is higher (by how much, not really sure, but I would guess about 80% or more).

That makes me wonder if the Android-using companies that tend to report in shipped volume rather than sales do so because their sales are simply not that good. Even back in the TouchPad days, people would always mention shipped numbers, but at the beginning of the fire sale, people found out how many actually sold.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Aren't the PowerVR (and really... the majority of ultra-mobile SoCs) better with video simply because they have hardware-based decoding? I thought Intel didn't add MPEG4 (h264, etc.) decoding until the i-series. Not sure....

The way that Nvidia decodes video (since the 9xxx series) and the way AMD decodes video (since the 6xxx series) is far superior to what SoCs provide as they actually decode using their stream processors much like FFMPEG does with your CPU. This leads to very robust decoding that can play a variety of non-standard encodes. Out of my large mkv collection, either of these solutions can play all of my content.

But Intel couldn't keep up with Nvidia or AMD on decoding so instead they went with a PowerVR solution that had a dedicated co-processor much like your average Blu Ray player might have. This works fine as long as the file meets the industry standards for encodes, but I find that at least 15% of my content is not within those standards (mostly on reference frames) and Intel solutions (and Broadcom solutions for the same reason) have problems playing those files. Finally the Frankenstein nature of these Intel netbook GPUs makes their drivers a nightmare, which is the reason Intel GPUs have had problems with 24p.

PowerVR is capable of making a good decoder. XBMC on the iPad 2 is able to play 90% of my files, which is better than any cell phone or tablet I have seen outside my SGS2 (95%). My issue is that Intel is not up to industry standard when the GPUs are used in netbooks, real laptops, and desktops.