- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius - Oscar Wilde
Something Neo from AMD
ALTHOUGH MANY punters were expecting AMD to launch an Atom-smasher, things haven't really turned out as they forecast. The company has launched the AMD Athlon Neo, but for all intents and purposes, isn't aiming at the Netbook market... at least not directly.
According to AMD, the Athlon Neo will populate the ultraportable, ultrathin segment where users are willing to drop a bit more dosh for the improved performance and user experience. Netbooks, at least the ones currently on the market, target the sub-$500 market (except where SSD options kick in). The 12-inch market is the sweet spot, although AMD considers it'll be popular in +/- an inch size lapwarmers. The Neo will fit all bills in the ultralight market, ranging from $499 to $1499. Not exactly a Netbook is it?
The specs come listed as: built on a 65nm process runs at 1.6GHz (8x200MHz), sporting 512KB of L2 cache, DDR2-667 and drawing 15W of power. It runs on a M690 chipset with the HT @ 3.6GHz. The system itself will have either the X1250 IGP (M690 chipset, DX9.0, SM2.0b, 90nm, 64MB dedicated+256MB shared) or a discrete HD 3400-series (DX10.1, DDR2, 64-bit memory interface) for the higher end parts. However, we're not quite sure why we'd need 1080p on a 12-inch display - this might just hint at HDMI being a solid possibility as a video output option.
Comparing it to the Atom is inevitable - if not to prove it isn't a direct competitor: Albeit built on last year's technology, the Athlon Neo is supposed to be much more powerful than the Atom... anywhere between 100-150% according to AMD's numbers, but on average 36% more expensive. They're also saying 4-8 hour battery life depending on the battery.
Atom, for all its "design wins", still lingers in that power consumption purgatory, as manufacturers always go for the cheap and fast 3-cell option. Early netbooks had 1H30m battery life. Today they're almost double that, save for Samsung and Asus who've done a great job at improving battery
More than fighting the Atom on specifications and superior technology, AMD's message is "you've tried Atom and it didn't deliver the performance you wanted... and it has really really crap multimedia features. Now we've got something that's slightly more expensive, but will deliver a really good overall experience without breaking the bank... or your back."
Intel will likely respond by pushing their Core Duo LV CPUs (like the L2400) and opening the flood gate on those marketing incentives that distris love so much.
It's interesting to see AMD is fighting back using Intel's own weapons. They're creating their own market niche, just like Atom did. In the end the Athlon Neo isn't really competing against the Netbook. It's a gamble, sure it is, but it's likely to pay off.
HP will be the first to market with their Neo-based HP dv2 Pavilion Entertainment Notebook PC. µ
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I was fortunate enough to get a loaner Yukon-based HP dv2 for a few days and did a little write-up you may find interesting with some usage model details. Blog here: http://budurl.com/HPdv2
First off, why was AMD's Patrick Moorehead's comment removed??? (It was here a moment ago.)
It said:
"I was fortunate enough to get a loaner Yukon-based HP dv2 for a few days and did a little write-up you may find interesting with some usage model details. Blog here: http://budurl.com/HPdv2 "
Anyways, now getting to my point. I think the best advantage that AMD has here is graphics. They own ATI, so it obviously gives them an upper hand over Intel's integrated graphics. But expect that to change in the netbook arena because nvidia are launching their Ion platform. Now I don't trust nvidia at all, but still, we badly need graphics on the Atom platform.
All this might change completely though, with the introduction to Larrabee. (I'm hoping it's introduced in time for my next system build.) And since Larrabee will be completely scalable with x86 cores, Intel can make integrated graphics out of the ones with fewer cores.
Patrick Moorhead's comment is back again.
It is so good to see a company with honorable business practices achieving their goals and dazzling us with state of the art technology and innovation ...
...so take me with a grain of salt, but they've certainly got something going technically here.
From a marketing/customer-relations perspective, Intel has a major advantage in that everything with an Atom in it is de facto a "netbook" -- because it's too small and underpowered to be called anything else. AMD has found the real niche -- affordable laptops, as has been the case for the past 5 years -- but they don't get a snazzy, readily identifiable name for the category that people can walk into a store and ask for.
Is it presumptuous of me to want to give them the benefit of the doubt and [with Via still conspicuously absent from any product wins that could've given them name rights] christen the category "neobooks?" It's one letter off and gives some credit where it's due.
Alternatively, "newtbooks" might suffice, as devices like these make the category slippery and hard to get a hold of.
I'm jumping in on this one.
Patrick asked us to replace the title on the comment. Like many of you commenting on The Inq, he put his business title instead of the comment title.
Geddit?
Don't go all conspiracy theory on us just yet... :)
Paul your supposed to be encouraging conspiracy theories here ... not squashing them.
Tsk Tsk ...
I heard that AMD had test silicon with a CPU and integrated GPU already booting windows ... now thats worth following up ... isn't it?