AMD to announce netbook CPU this week?

As promised by CEO Dirk Meyer back in July, AMD is expected to reveal its netbook strategy tomorrow at the company’s analyst conference, and many are hoping it’ll focus around Bobcat. The supposed chip will focus on two of the areas where netbooks have commonly struggled a bit, video playback performance and battery life, while sticking to the goal of achieving smaller form factors and lower notebook price points.

Reports suggest AMD is aiming for an eight to nine hour battery life while still offering better performance that its rival, Intel’s Atom CPU. Details are yet to be announced, but previous leaks suggest Bobcat will contain a single 1GHz 64-bit core, 128KB of L1 cache, 256KB of L2, an 800MHz HyperTransport link, a DDR 2 memory controller, and an 8W power envelope. AMD is also expected to leverage its ownership of ATI to beef up the video performance in its forthcoming netbook platform, so we’ll likely the CPU and video chipset blend into a tiny package.