Most Netbooks carry an Intel Atom processor but for the first time, a low voltage AMD chip has found its way into a Netbook, the Gateway LT3103u Netbook produced by Acer.
The single core AMD Athlon 64 L 110 is a variant of the Neo chip that AMD designed specifically for lighter and thinner laptops but certainly not for Netbooks.
The news wouldn’t be too surprising if AMD hadn’t repeatedly said in the past that they weren’t interested in producing chips for Netbooks. So why have they changed their mind?
Well they haven’t actually. They still aren’t interested in producing chips for Netbooks but they can’t afford to completely write off the potential of Netbooks these days, particularly as PC makers are keen to cash in on their popularity.
Netbooks sell, and even if the world is experiencing a financial meltdown, sales of Netbooks are positively booming. So how do AMD justify their stance?
“AMD has fully anticipated that our technology would eventually appear at the upper end of the netbook space,” said Steve Howard, an AMD spokesman. Though the chip was designed for ultra thin notebooks, AMD did not want to restrict the desire of PC makers to use it in different form factors, he said.
So what they’re saying really is that although they don’t want to make chips for Netbooks and don’t want them to end up in Netbooks, they accept that they will.
You might ask why the resistance? Well not surprisingly it all comes down to cash. Netbooks are cheap and therefore AMD aren’t going to get a good return.
Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research has been quoted as saying that if AMD had a choice they would rather put the chip in more expensive laptops to extract better margins and therefore may try to limit the chip’s usage in other Netbooks.
Well the AMD chip is in a Netbook now regardless and there’s every chance we’ll see more Netbooks carrying these chips in future. In the meantime why else would we want a Gateway LT3100?
The Netbook has an 11.6 inch display, a full size keyboard and a multi gesture touchpad, ATI Radeon X1270 graphics card, 2GBs DDR2 RAM, 250GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, multi card reader, 3 USB 2.0 ports, and comes in either red or black.
“The Gateway LT3100 is a smart netbook choice” said Ray Sawall, senior product marketing manager for Acer America.
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