Pinetrail Sucks

It seems that the Intel empire has come under assault from all sides. The European Union’s finding against Intel was only just beginning to slip from the public memory when Intel unexpectedly settled with AMD For a sum of 1.25 billion dollars. Even this, however, did not succeed in resolving Intel’s anti-trust issues, as the FTC has now begun lay into Intel.

As is typical, Intel has responded by saying they have not hurt consumers. Given Intel’s recent success, it at first seems hard argue they’re not producing the products consumers want. But I think that if you look at Intel a bit more critically it isn’t hard to see how a lack of competition is allowing Intel to rest on its laurels.

Case in point? Pinetrail.

I can’t remember a more disappointing product release in recent memory. Besides a modest increase in battery life, Pinetrail does absolutely nothing new from consumers. We can expect that new Pinetrail netbooks are going to operate the same as any other Atom powered netbook made in the last two years.

For Intel, I’m sure Pinetrail is exciting indeed. By integrating the graphics and the memory controller Intel has managed to compact the functionality of the typical Atom hardware, reducing the costs of manufacturing the product. If you’re an Intel shareholder this is great news. Atom has always resulted in far less profit than other products in Intel’s stable.

But I’m not an Intel shareholder, and neither are most people who buy netbooks. I couldn’t care less if Intel is reducing costs. Yes, perhaps these cost reductions will eventually trickle down to consumers, but I have my doubts. Atoms processors and the associated chipset are only a small fraction of the product costs of a netbook. Besides, it is not cost which needs improvement. There are bigger fish to fry, such as multi-threaded performance and support for video acceleration. These are areas where Atom could show the greatest improvement, and they are also areas Intel has ignored.

Could it be any other way? Of course it could. Intel is not making any improvements because they don’t really have to. Atom could be better. But with no competitor capable of providing a similar product, Intel has no incentive to move quickly. AMD’s supposed Atom-fighter, Bobcat, will not be around until 2011. Until then Intel’s primary goal will be to squeeze as much profit as possible out of every Atom it sells. This ruthlessness is arguably the primary reason Intel has come to its current position as the dominate world-wide chip maker. Even if AMD’s Bobcat arrived soon, and turned out to be a clearly better product, we would be back to square one. Intel has made no admission of guilt (remember, a settlement is not an admission of guilt) and so there is no reason to expect Intel will change its ways. Bobcat based products would become scarce the moment Intel began hinting that processors are a risky business and supplies might happen to dry up a PC maker sells too many AMD based products.

So here we are. Pinetrail is out. We will see a little bit more battery life and perhaps slightly lower prices, and that is all the world’s largest and most successful computer electronics corporation could come up with. None of Atom’s problems have been addressed. Although if you really feel that you’re unsatisfied with the performance of Atom, well, Intel will quite happily direct you to a (more expensive and still graphically deficient) CULV based ultraportable.

This, my friends, is why no one should be happy about a monopoly.