AMD Ontario-equipped netbooks due out early next year

[Jos]

AMD has previously announced that its first Fusion chips for netbooks, based on the 40nm 'Ontario' architecture, are slated for release before the end of the year. But it looks like the first actual products to use them won't arrive until early next year. According to the latest update from DigiTimes, several major netbook manufacturers including the likes of Acer, Asus and HP are planning to introduce Fusion-based systems in the first quarter of 2011.

Intel has been pretty much the only real viable alternative for netbook makers since the category's inception. But if AMD can deliver on its low power consumption, affordable price, and strong performance claims they might finally bring some serious competition and rekindled excitement for the weakening netbook market.

German site Hardware-infos.com reportedly managed to get their hands on some leaked performance numbers, and from the stats alone AMD's Ontario APU is starting to look promising. At 3,047 GIPS integer and 1,351 GLOPS floating point it performed almost twice as fast as Intel's Atom D510 and fell just 15% short of a low power Athlon II X2. It should be noted that Ontario based chips will offer a full DirectX 11 graphics core built in. We still don't know how Ontario will compare in the power consumption front against competing chips, but AMD says it will use up much less than the rumored 18W.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/39865-amd-ontario-equipped-netbooks-due-out-early-next-year.html

 

[raybay]

What is the big delay? Marketing or manufacture ?

 

[Vrmithrax]

The manufacturers are probably hoping to dump as much current stock as possible during the Christmas rush - if this new AMD is really double the speed, along with all the other perks, I could see many of the Atom units getting passed by by consumers.

Plus there is always some extra lag when first adapting to a new processor package, can imagine a little more tweakage is required when it's a CPU/GPU combination.

 

[pmshah]

Regardless of the cpu performance unless they come out with a chipset that functions properly it is not going to have any takers.

For instance I have 4 PCs connected through a CablesToGo kvm switch whicj has standard ps2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse. These connect to the PCs through usb ports. PC with MSI-K9A2GM motherboard and AMD Phenom Quad always gives problems in recognition and the KVM requires to be reset.

Another problem with their USB port is a specific flash drive - Kingston 16 gb Data Traveller cannot be written to. Even while reading it gives oxxassional errors. It works flawlessly on ABSOLUTELY every other PC I have used it on.

BTW Sandisk - 2 to 32 gb and DataTraveller 4 gb work flawlessly!

Unfortunately MSI and AMD have been unresponsive to this problem even after repeated complaints.

What would be perfect would be nVidia designing an ION chipset for this cpu.