I just discovered this thing made by Acer called the Iconia Tab W500 and I think I need one. It's basically a full tablet PC with a keyboard dock, but deep inside it's like a geeky fantasy machine! I started looking at the specs and realized that though it's obvious competitor is the iPad, it's performance is actually pretty close to the MacBook Air. Of course it doesn't run any fancy Apple OS, but AMD support in Linux seems to be alright, and it might even make a good Google ChromeOS guinea pig. I spent several hours looking around at benchmarks so I'm now inclined to explain my findings to you. Sit down, this could take a while.

Basics

It's no surprise the Acer looks pretty chunky compared to the anorexic Apple offerings. It's got a slightly larger screen than the iPad, but twice the weight which is surprising considering it's smaller battery. The keyboard might be included, but I don't know.

Connectivity

Strangely the Iconia lacks a Bluetooth connection. There's room for a Bluetooth dongle in one of it's 4 USB 2.0 ports, but it won't need one for ethernet or HDMI as these are built in. You can't get it with 3G yet, but who wants to sign another contract anyway?

Technical

This is where it gets interesting, but kinda complicated. See, computers today are coalecing into just a handful of chips. The MacBook Air has a graphics chip made by Nvidia soldered to it's logic board along with a dual-core Intel CPU which is pretty old-fashioned. The iPad and Iconia however use what's called a "system on a chip" which combines the GPU and CPU among other things into a single chip. Apple went one step further with their A5 chip and threw some RAM right on top to make a nice little silicon sandwich called a "platform on platform".

But here's the thing; Apple didn't design either the CPU or the GPUs in the iPad. The two CPU cores are licensed from ARM who design low-power 32bit "reduced instruction set" chips. These chips aren't as powerful as the x86 chips in your desktop, but they sip electricity so they can be found in most handhelds. The graphics cores—which Apple claims are 9x faster than the original iPad—are licensed from PowerVR who's designs also powered the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Wii. Similar GPUs were licensed by Intel to provide integrated graphics for the original Atom platform. These were so bad that Nvidia developed the supplementary Ion graphics chipset to boost performance

The Iconia's chip is a completely different story. It was developed by Intel competitor AMD following their merger with Nvidia's biggest rival ATI. AMD's x86 CPUs gave Intel a run for their money as some of the first viable 64bit chips on the market, but Intel chips generally outperform their more affordable AMD alternatives. ATI's graphics cards on the otherhand have stayed neck and neck with the performance of Nvidia, and often for cheaper. When AMD bought ATI, Intel was starting to sell their onboard graphics chips (despite poor performance) hand-in-hand with their popular CPUs. It was clear that AMD/ATI would need to combine forces to compete.

This year AMD released the Fusion platform; a chip which combines two 1Ghz 64bit CPUs similar to the Atom chips in most netbooks, with 80 Evergreen GPU cores as found in the mid-low range Radeon HD 4330 graphics cards. Having these systems living on the same chip makes for massive power savings as well as a cheaper system to build overall. When benchmarked against an Intel i5 with Intel's GMA HD on-board graphics (similar to the chipset in a 13" MacBook Pro) Fusion sometimes doubled framerate performance in 3D games. Compared to the cheaper Atom chips they compete directly with, Fusion dominates when it comes to graphics.

Now I'm not trying to say that the Iconia is faster than the MacBook Air. In CPU intensive tasks Fusion struggles to equal similarly priced Atom+Ion systems, but when it comes to graphics the Iconia isn't far behind. It also has high frequency DDR3 memory, and a solid state drive to back it up.

Peripherals

Last are the bells and whistles. The keyboard looks good especially if you love nub pointers, and a memory card slot is always welcome. The Iconia has both front and rear cameras, but lacks the location and positioning sensors that are needed so badly for maps and games. GPS is often included with cellular radios, so maybe if they make a 3G version, but something tells me I won't see a compass or accelerometer anytime soon.

So, for nearly $200 less than an iPad you can have a full tablet PC that outperforms most netbooks. I'm using an Asus EeePC with an Atom N550 Ion chipset as my daily driver. I've had it less than a year, but with all the trouble that Nvidia's drivers give me in Ubuntu I'm ready to get rid of it. The Iconia might just be my next PC.