The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

www.wired.com:
Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. “If everything you’re doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?” OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. “Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?” The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD’s vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: “Now imagine you’ve got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game.”