I’ve been patiently awaiting a competitor to the ASUS Eee netbook. Why? So I can be writing stuff like this without actually sitting at my desk. It’s not meant to replace my desktop — merely accompany it. I’ve looked at the MSI Wind, the Acer Aspire One and the ASUS Eee line, but I just couldn’t commit to any of them. Then Dell shows up with their Inspiron Mini 9.
Intel’s Atom based devices are slowly rolling out, but what about AMD? They have nothing at the moment. We’ll have to wait until 2009 for AMD’s contribution to this up and coming processor market. As for details, check out this quote:
“This new report still doesn’t mention a name for the chip, but it says AMD will base it on a 65nm K8 core clocked at 1.2GHz. That mostly corroborates the leaked slide, which mentioned a 1GHz AMD64 CPU with 256KB of cache, a built-in DDR2-400 memory controller, an 8W power envelope, and a 27 x 27-mm ball-grid-array package. AMD will supposedly attempt to undercut Intel’s Atom with lower prices.”
Cheaper than Atom? Not bad. Consume more power than Atom? Ooo…I don’t know about that.
I remember VIA as the “other” chipset vendor. You know, the cheaper alternative with picky PCI clockrate issues. That was a long time ago. Nowadays, they’re in the business of low cost and low power chipsets and processors. Starting Thursday VIA will be partnering up with NVIDIA in order to take on Intel and its Atom platform . All the best to the soon-to-be newly weds!
Speaking of Atom, the MSI Wind finally launched. It comes in two configurations:
$399 - Linux and 512 MB DDR2
$499 - Windows XP Home 1 GB DDR2 (2 GB maximum)
Both come with the usual array of features which you can discover for yourself on MSI’s website.
I’ve been keeping my eye out for a laptop like this - especially ones configured with Intel Atom processors. Between this and the ASUS Eee PC 1000, I’ve got plenty to think about. Which is the better one? I don’t know yet.
Atom is a big deal. With the success of the Asus EEE PC and Apple iPhone, the desire for more performance in smaller form factors is slowly ramping up. Imagine a handheld device like the iPhone, but with the power to run a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 and all the other typical PC applications with no slowdowns. Imagine the headache engineers must be endure in order to squeeze so much power into such a small form factor with current processor offerings.
The new Intel Atom architecture is hoping to achieve all that.
