Big netbooks
AMD wants to push its big netbook, Atom alternatives and it wants to put a low power CPU in a reasonable, big but thin and light notebook.
Management at AMD got an idea from the Mac Air success and at the same time it noticed that Atoms are very good alternative a second PC on the road, but not behaving good as ones only PC. You simply cannot spend 10 hours working on a 10-inch computer, at least not if you are a grown man.
AMD’s 14+ inch Atom contenders will come out in the second half of 2009 and we suspect that Intel will counter AMD with its Atoms in the same form factor. The big danger for Intel is that once it launches Atom in 14 or 16 inches it will destroy its average selling prices on notebook chips even further, and this is something that everyone will try to avoid in 2009.
The Texas based company has nothing to lose, as its Turion Ultra, aka Puma failed to impress the market and this might be AMD’s chance to come back.
It plans single and dual-core sub 20W-platforms (CPU+IGP chipset) and this is something that a few AMD VPs have already confirmed. We have to wait and see if this strategy will work and this might be the right thing for 2009.
