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

 

ATI's standard display driver will need some adaptation for our GreenZone power conservation. WorldBooks have a 16:9, true HD aspect ratio display. This is great for spreading out multiple windows or documents horizontally, or, of course, enjoying widescreen presentations and movies. When you're not deeply multitasking, when all you're doing is word processing or checking your e-mail, as much as two thirds of the backlight power is wasted. GreenZone shuts off the backlighting for the left and right sides of the display, leaving a 4:3 ratio virtual display in the center. This amounts to yanking the cord from your widescreen monitor and plugging in your old squarish CRT. It's not something a notebook GPU is designed to handle.

The GPU can offload a number of math-intensive tasks from the CPU. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video decoding and encoding provide a stirring example of the power savings that can be derived from offloading. When decoding video with the GPU, the CPU can practically idle. An unaided CPU can be overwhelmed by software MPEG-2 processing, and decoding Blu-ray or Transport Stream (HD cable box, for instance) on an x86 CPU is a cruel thing to do to innocent silicon. ATI's integrated graphics processor accelerates MPEG-2 playback, but when graphics memory is shared with the CPU there is always a price to pay.

We see great potential in the use of GPUs for cryptography. We configured full disk encryption into WorldBook, and we're planning to borrow the GPU's resources to make encryption work in real-time during periods of heavy demand. If you're auto-saving a Word file every five minutes, software disk encryption will suffice. If you're reindexing a 50GB database, building a huge development project, or transcoding high-def video down to an iPod, hardware encryption will be a big help.

Always-on communications
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are present, as you'd expect. Apple made the world safe for 802.11n, drafty though it is, and on a very good day you can get a 300 megabit link. 802.11n makes wired Ethernet optional for many uses. Bluetooth is adequate for cellphone and VoIP, and it's key to our design that the WorldBook operate just as a cell phone does for taking incoming calls. Very few are acquainted with Bluetooth's usefulness for wireless headphones and remote control because neither has been implemented well in the mainstream. WorldBook will change that with a sensitive and powerful Bluetooth radio, keyboard injection drivers for Bluetooth remote control (AVRCP, or audio video remote control protocol), and stable drivers for high-fidelity Bluetooth stereo audio. The Wii remote is the least expensive Bluetooth remote control on the market. Wouldn't you use it for presentations if your system supported it?

The Embedded Smartphone, which we sometimes refer to as WorldBook's System-In-System (SIS), is an independent ARM (advanced RISC machine) microcontroller running a cut-down Linux kernel. Calling it a smartphone is a bit misleading, because it is useful whether the optional cellular radio module is installed or not. While the notebook is running, the ARM system will supply the brains for the touchpad/tablet, drive the LCD panels on the lid and under the touchpad, and support the running of small Java and Flash applications on those displays. ARM microcontrollers have their own RAM and flash memory. WorldBook will feature an SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) memory card slot to expand the ARM system's memory and to work as low performance solid state storage for the notebook. The ARM CPU will be wired into the WorldBook via PCI-Express, so the notebook and ARM systems can communicate and borrow each other's resources.