James Delahunty
14 Mar 2010 18:02
AMD is pushing its 'Ontario' dual-core chip for use in netbooks, according to an "AMD Notebook Platform Roadmap" slide that is doing the rounds again. The chip though is not "new" news, with Ontario being made public by AMD in November 2009. The chip is part of AMD's "Fusion" line-up. It contains AMD's "Bobcat" core and will have an on-board DirectX 11 graphics processing unit (GPU).
AMD has treated the market for notebooks and ultrathin devices quite differently from Intel. Intel has developed its Atom line of chips specifically for these small-scale devices whilst AMD maintains that they are essentially just tiny notebooks and don't need dedicated chips.
Maybe AMD is correct in a way, as sales show that users buy the netbooks with larger screens (relative to netbook sizes), larger hard-drives and with software capabilities of their notebooks. Linux-based netbooks haven't sold as well as Windows, and low-storage-space SSD netbooks lose out to traditional HDD-based netbooks.
It's clear from popular netbooks then that users aren't buying them just for web browsing and Internet-based cloud applications as they are often marketed for, but instead want netbooks as capable as full-sized notebooks, just smaller.