Toshiba announced today it expects to put AMD processors in about 20 percent of the notebooks it sells in the United States and Europe, ending its ties with Intel Corp. as an exclusive provider for the chips that power its laptop computers.
"With PCs becoming commodity products, there seems to be a new way of thinking that competition should be introduced even in procurement of such core parts like processors as long as there are no major differences in product specifications," Macquarie Securities analyst Yoshihiro Shimada said.
Not many specific details were revealed, except the AMD chips will be used in entry-level laptops and are expected to sell up to $82 less than comparable models. While AMD's far larger rival Intel leads the market with an astounding 80% market share, AMD continues to struggle to keep up in the expanding laptop sector announcing its own platform called Puma to be launched in mid-2008 - in response to Intel's Santa Rosa - and scoring a deal as exclusive chip supplier for the One Laptop Per Child XO notebook - to which Intel responded with their own machine for emerging markets called the Classmate PC.