We attended AMD’s press conference at Computex earlier this year, where they were full of bluster about the potential for their new Fusion chips, which offer performance increases through a System-on-a-chip style CPU / GPU integration.
We remained cautiously pessimistic, given the company’s history in the ultraportable / netbook space, but it was a welcome acknowledgement of the significance of the smaller form-factor nonetheless. Today another potential ray of hope has emerged – in an earnings call, CEO Dirk Meyer let slip that the Ontario chips are actually ahead of schedule and may be released to AMD’s hardware partners before the end of the year, so we could see some Ontario-packin’ machines in early 2011.
If AMD can seriously commit to the netbook form-factor and deliver on the promises made at Computex, they can consider us interested, not least because of what the Ontario chip promises performance-wise (comparable processing power to current generation Atom chips, but with reduced power consumption and greatly improved graphical horsepower), but also because it’s about time Intel had some serious competition in this market.
Source – TechReport
Via Liliputing
