Friday, January 16, 2009

Home Shopping Network explains semiconductors

Flipping channels, I see HSN selling Acer Aspire One netbooks. I think they're selling the 8.9" version for $480. The guy making the sell was trying to explain why the computer was so "small yet powerful." He pulls out a piece of paper with a penny and a Intel Atom CPU die taped to the paper. Then he shows a old Intel Pentium CPU to make the comparison. Sigh... of course the Pentium is huge compared to the Atom; one is a fully packaged chip and the other is just a die. He should have compared the Pentium die vs. the Atom die but that wouldn't be as impressive.

I wish they would stop calling it a "powerhouse" computer. The Atom CPU is not that fast, more like a Celeron than a Core2 Duo. I read on a UK PC website that it took ~20 minutes to open Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint simultaneously. Good thing it only draws 2 watts of power as you wait and wait and wait.

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Just as I thought. You can find the same computer on Amazon.com for ~$350. Why would you buy it from HSN?

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