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

 

A key element in our power design is to overlay RAM with flash memory. Once an OS and its drivers are installed, a memory image of the system's booted state can be saved as a snapshot and restored to RAM at boot time. This process is often called hibernation, and making it work requires a lot of effort from the OS. With custom firmware, the system could transparently power up from a memory snapshot, demand-copying pages from flash to RAM so that users can begin using the system without waiting for the entire snapshot to load. If flash is not used in hibernate mode, it can be used to store the system boot image and device driver cache, eliminating disk spin-up and seek delays from the boot process.

An internal Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive is a given. The desktop replacement contingent went all out for capacity and RPMs, power conservation be hanged, while the green party gathered around a driveless design. We built the lighter model of WorldBook, the Ether, to use solid-state disk (SSD). There might be a mobile SSD solution out there to pull off the rack, but assembling a fine one from components is no great effort. The access speed issue of flash can be addressed by a battery-backed static RAM cache, with the battery serving the purpose of making cached reads and writes safe even if power is interrupted. We also dreamed up the idea of a striped flash array that spreads reads and writes across modules, RAID-style.

It's got game, er, PowerPoint
We invested the greatest amount of forward-looking risk in the expectation that ATI/AMD's Hybrid Graphics would support a switched mode. Hybrid Graphics is a chipset feature that allows the use of either power-saving but slower integrated graphics, which uses system memory for video memory, or very fast but less efficient discrete GPU. Right now, Hybrid Graphics is an OEM design shortcut, and notebooks will ship with either integrated graphics or a discrete GPU.

It is conceivable that a system using ATI/AMD Hybrid Graphics could be designed to switch between integrated and GPU modes. You might choose integrated mode for battery operation and switch to the GPU when you're on the charger. Switching would not be a simple matter. It's complicated enough that it might require rebooting, or at least hibernation. In the ideal case, the system will shift between integrated and GPU, or a combination of the two, as needed.

We could talk about making room for coming 3-D GUIs and applications, but we're all grown-ups here. Even the serious-minded prefer a notebook that has the ability to run games, even if they don't use computer games now. We certainly want our desktops to be able to run games, and no notebook makes the grade as a desktop replacement unless it can render HD-resolution 3-D graphics in real time.