AMD CEO Dirk Meyer recently revealed that his “company is currently developing a platform that features lower-power, smaller-sizes, more complete functionality, and a cheaper price than Intel’s Atom for netbooks,” according to DigiTimes. Sounds great. The fact that AMD owns ATI should make for an awesome mish-mash of processors and graphics. So let’s start rolling these things out, eh?
Whoops, not so fast. The platform won’t be ready until next year.
This is a serious problem for AMD. Intel’s been cleaning up in the netbook space for over a year now and AMD is nowhere to be found. Well, that’s not totally true. It does have its Neo platform in HP’s dv2, but that’s about it. With Intel purposely hamstringing the graphics setups on the Atom platform and VIA still in the early stages of trying to gain market share, AMD could have and should have had a potent CPU + ATi GPU setup on the market months ago.
Instead “samples are expected to be delivered to partners in 2010,” which means that even if they’re delivered in January, we won’t see them in consumer products for a few months after that. Meyer noted that the line between netbooks and notebooks will continue to blur and that the term “netbook” will eventually fade away, so this new platform will be a notebook platform, not a netbook platform. So basically, by the time nobody says “netbook” any more, AMD will have its Atom killer ready.
AMD CEO reveals Atom-beater expected for 2010 [DigiTimes]