Throughout the short life of The Smartbook Blog we’ve talked at length about Intel, ARM, Qualcomm, FreeScale, Nvidia and more, but one company has remained surprisingly quiet – until now…
Hardware Central reports that AMD is finally looking to jump headfirst into the netbook/smartbook space. The chip giant will extend its Fusion line in early 2011 to produce a chip it claims can give both Atom and ARM processors a run for their money and even upset Nvidia’s Ion.
“If we’d had a part, we’d have been in this space,” explained Nigel Dessau, AMD’s senior marketing executive. “We didn’t have a part so we went and worked on a part for the thin and light space. The plan is to come to market next year with a Fusion part that fits nicely in a netbook type thing.”
While it may just be loose terminology, I’d be inclined to believe “netbook type thing” is Dessau’s way of saying AMD is going after all affordable computing in the netbook space which would obviously include smartbooks. Furthermore, AMD has one key advantage: ATI.
The company plans to make the new Fusion chipset a combination of AMD CPU and ATI GPU, in effect creating an Ion rivalling platform yet avoiding the lengthy and expensive legal battles currently going on between Intel and Nvidia. “You won’t need Ion graphics to give it half-decent performance,” added Dessau.
Combine this fighting talk with the extra $1.25 billion in its coffers from the successful anti-trust litigation against Intel back in November, and five years of cross licensing Intel patent rights, and AMD could well be back in the game. Watch this space.
Gordon
