AMD to launch Bobcat, a chip specially made for netbooks. Next year!

At the moment, Intel has a huge monopole in this big and growing market of netbooks. Their Atom lines are part of a vast majority of these mini laptops, probably found on around 80-90% of them. And it’s not like i don’t appreciate Atom processors, they’re good at what they do. But competition is a catalyst for improvement. If there were 2-3 competitors breathing down on Intel’s back when they developed the PineTrail line, perhaps they would have made it more potent. Or even cheaper, or even more energy effective.

In fact, the only competition Intel could have in terms of x86 platforms would come from AMD. They have some decent configurations available on netbooks these days, with price and performance on their side. However, in terms of battery life, ADM equipped devices can’t face the ones with Intel. Not even by far. That’s because the actual platform used by ADM on netbooks wasn’t meant for these mini laptops.

But this is going to change, as the guys on AMD are working on a new platform destined for netbooks, called Bobcat. It will be able to bring good performances while keeping TDP low (somewhere in the 10-20 W range) and will also offer proper integrated video solutions (developed with ATI). Thus, we’ll finally see some netbooks with decent overall performance and we’ll get rid of the sluggishness i keep bumping it on every PineTrail equipped system. And according to AMD, we’re only going to see the Bobcats on devices up to 12 inch big.

However, there’s one problem in this story. The new ADM platform will be part of their Fusion line and it will only be available in 2011. Yeah, that means next year. So while the perspective of having a Bobcat in my netbook sounds interesting right now, many things can happen in an entire year. Kinda makes me wondering where did the guys at AMD sleep from the Fall of 2007 till now…

Source: NetbookChoice and Hardware Central

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Tags: AMD, AMD Bobcat, Intel Atom

Last updated: April 23, 2010 | Published: March 13th, 2010 | Add the first comment!