Looks like AMD’s new Fusion platform is winning battle after battle against Intel’s Atom chip in the netbook market. After Acer swapped an Intel Atom for a 1GHz AMD C-50 Ontario APU for its Aspire One 522, now Toshiba does the same thing and dumps the Intel chip for the aforementioned new and exciting APU, according to engadget.com.
The Toshiba NB550D netbook remains untouched in all other compartments, except the CPU (or APU, in AMD slang).
This means that the 10 inch netbook will also have Harman Kardon speakers (which you can use also as speakers for a music player while the netbook is shut down), HDMI output, an initial 1 GB of DDR3 (but who would want to stick with that?), 250 GB of storage and 3 USB ports you can use to charge other devices.
The C-50 Ontario comes with on board graphics, namely Radeon HD 6250M, and this is said to bring down the battery life with half an hour, from Atom’s estimated 10 hours to a 9.5 for AMD’s APU. Well, it’s a good compromise considering the performance brought by the graphic chip.
Add that to the astonishing speakers and you’ve got a great multimedia netbook. But looks also score points with this one because of the hand soft finish on the lid and the ultra slim design.
Toshiba NB550D
We don’t know how the AMD APU performs in real life situations, but the NB550D is surely a good choice for those looking for style in a netbook. If the hardware will perform at the expected parameters, this might be one of the year’s gems. Well, fortunately we won’t have to wait for too long to see it at work, as CES is about to start and we’ll definitely have more about it (including pricing) in the days to come.
