The birth of the InfoWorld WorldBooks

What sort of laptop could PC makers create if they were willing to think outside the boring old box? To find out, we took to the drawing board ourselves

 

The thin, domed, clamshell-like design spurred a lot of lively debate over must-have peripherals versus those that can be attached externally. The simplest delineation is the one that Apple used: Whatever you normally use on a plane is built into the notebook. Whatever you use at your desk is an accessory. The slim clamshell design also requires doing away with tall ports and peripherals. Even a slimline, slot-fed optical drive is too tall to build into a domed chassis, and given optical drives' heavy power draw and high failure rate, it didn't take much convincing to leave it out.

We were sorely tempted to eliminate the RJ-45 Ethernet port from both models. An RJ-45 necessitates carving a maw into a streamlined case, and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter makes a simple and inexpensive substitute. In the end, we compromised, omitting the RJ-45 from the ultra-mobile Ether (for the sake of an additional USB port) but leaving it in the desktop-replacement Meteor.

To address these compromises on Ethernet and DVD, we designed a small external system-powered device we called the DiscDock. This is primarily a gigabit Ethernet and DVD burner dock with a USB hub, and we later added other cheap and handy add-ons like a DVI port for a computer monitor, an HDMI port for HD video and audio, and an unpowered eSATA port for an external hard drive. We never got around to settling how this dock would connect to the WorldBook. USB wouldn't drive Ethernet up to gigabit speed, but it would be better than 10/100. ExpressCard seems ideal, but it would take much longer to design the dock, primarily because the cable between the card and the dock would have to be custom-made. In either case, a separate video cable from the DisplayPort would be needed to drive the displays.

Under the cover
The notebook portion of WorldBook is fairly straightforward, with some innovative twists that only gearheads would notice in the specs but which benefit all users. The platform is AMD’s "Puma," utilizing AMD's Turion X2 Ultra dual-core CPU, AMD M780G chipset, and the ATI/AMD Radeon Mobility 3800 GPU. The CPU has 1MB of dedicated L2 cache per core, on-board memory, and bus controllers, a HyperTransport 3.0 scalable I/O bus, independent voltage and frequency control for each core, and a slew of power-saving features that will remain latent due, in part, to manufacturers' tendency to spend little time tuning systems and pre-loaded OSes for anything other than generic Intel x86.

Being devoted to one supplier and a cohesive platform, and knowing that the least capable model in our product line will always be a 2.4GHz dual-core Turion X2 Ultra with a discrete GPU, we don't have to dumb anything down. We'll trade the usual deep discounts on component pricing offered to exclusive customers for a couple of months split between Dresden and Ontario (AMD and ATI engineering operations, respectively), sponging up all we can from their engineers.