Asus outs new Vivobook X102BA netbook

People should stop calling this a netbook due to the following concrete reasons:
1. The term “Netbook” is only applicable to those small, low-cost laptops that comes with an Intel Atom processor. Additionally, Intel trademarked the term and later sued the company named Psion for using the said term. The term “netbook” is only applicable to those laptops that are only capable of web browsing as its most intensive task. Such term is not applicable to AMD laptops since the netbook term is coined by Intel, just like the Ultrabook term.

2. Netbooks are dead. With the introduction of low power Celeron and Pentium chips from Intel and low power AMD A-series from AMD, manufacturers started to favor the use of these chips because of their good price:performance ratio compared to what Intel Atom offers. Not to mention, the rise of GPU-assisted computing and the introduction of Windows 8 helped in burying the netbook for good. Most major manufacturers have ceased in making netbooks with the Asus Eee series saying goodbye with its 1025C Flare netbook released last year.

3. Thanks to the GPU of this notebook, GPU-assisted computing or so-called “Heterogeneous computing/Stream computing” is possible which means this is more than just a web-surfing machine. A netbook isn’t even capable of that. It can also handle different GPU-assisted apps there such as Adobe Photoshop CS6, Sony Vegas Pro 12, CyberLink PowerDirector, Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and some games too. Those mentioned tasks will simply put a netbook onto its knees. This is a machine that does more than web browsing.

4. ASUS stopped using the term “netbook” on their latest 10-inch notebooks. They’ve ceased the production of Eee PC line of netbooks too.

The Jaguar cores have better IPC than the Atoms, but at only 1.0GHz with no turbo boost, the actual CPU performance might even fall below that of some dual-core Atoms.

The GPU will also be limited by the slow CPU, as well as the slow, single-channel memory. It will still blow away whatever iGPU they use in the current Atoms, but not as much as it could have.

Still, it should still provide a better overall experience than an Atom-powered netbook. It will be no match for small ULV Celeron-powered notebooks though, so they need to price this appropriately (maybe around 10k?), to have any chance of competing.