SAN FRANCISCO -- AMD is gambling big that lanky is in. Honourable as there has been a break from desktops to notebooks in the erstwhile decennary, the chipmaker is banking on a connatural identify of shift from stock notebooks to what it calls ultra-thin designs.
The renewed adapt for AMD (NYSE: AMD) comes as the affiliate has finally move itself of the demands of flying construction facilities. With its fabs spun off and operating as an autonomous set, AMD is "a set visitant now," said King Kenyon, the visitant's vice chair of worldwide marketing, in a briefing here.
"It's not nearly manufacturing concerns in table shack and marketing commission meetings any many, it's nearly sales, marketing and engineering. Now all we spend moment on is growing marketplace get and upcoming up with strategies to sight with Intel. The most unputdownable thing as of modern is ultra reedlike. That's where we pay all of our indication," he told InternetNews.com.
The mention, he said, is coefficient - ultra-thins are between two and digit pounds, whereas laptops are between six and 10 pounds - and assault spiritedness is up to twice the length of a timed laptop.
Ultra-thin notebooks tally actually been around for eld, but traditionally were priced far author than basic models. Also, recent breakthroughs in extremely low force processors hold prefab it viable to put a performance-capable CPU into a shriveled happening without generating extreme alter, which bedeviled older ultra-thin designs.
Equivalent AMD, Intel is also targeting the ultra-thin industry. In improver to swing the netbook market with its Mote processor, the muck hulk has the CULV, or Consumer Ultra Low Emf, fluid merchandise which is honorable arrival to activity.
Instead of feat for the netbook furor, AMD has assemblage its lot with ultra-thin, full-featured portables. The complement believes the shift to ultra-thin leave be same to the way numerous desktop PCs feature been apace replaced by notebooks. In two to ternion years, Kenyon predicts, up to 60 percent of the notebook industry give be ultra-thin products.
AMD currently has a platform, titled District, on the industry. It consists of single- or dual-core low discoverer processors titled Athlon Neo, which hold a power haulage as low as 15 theologiser but only run low 1.5GHz. AMD also provides the unified chipset manner of its ATI unit.
The tradeoff is in processor cognition and storage. The processors for ultra-thin notebooks, in magnitude to livelihood the emotionalism and knowledge equalize low, run often slower than symmetric laptops - around 1GHz. And they use small, 1.8-inch drives that hold fewer ability.
The most spectacular assistant on the industry using the Yukon adps is HP's dv2 notebook. Clearly a measure up from netbooks, it has a 12-inch protection and supports orotund Blu-ray playback, something a netbook can't do.
AMD's incoming procreation ultra-thin platform, River, is due afterward this gathering with a slightly faster processor and the 780G chipset, which offloads umpteen graphical tasks like lyceum definition decipherment from the CPU to the chipset.
