Technology news and Jobs arrow Fuzzy Logic arrow Toshiba using AMD again after 7 year itch
Toshiba using AMD again after 7 year itch E-mail
by Alex Zaharov-Reutt   
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Toshiba’s announcement that it will use AMD in low cost entry-level and some mid-range notebooks to save costs and sell notebooks at a cheaper price, signaling good news for AMD, but still leaving Intel with 80% of the market.

Not since the year 2000 has Toshiba used AMD processors in its notebooks, with AMD eventually suing Intel (an action which is still ongoing), alleging that Intel paid computer companies significant sums of money to exclusive use Intel processors in their computers, helping boost the Intel and then the Centrino brand at a time when Intel was under attack by AMD at the high end. 

The Centrino brand for notebook computers have proven massively popular, much like the Pentium logo and ‘Intel Inside’ did for years of desktop sales. Today’s Santa Rosa based ‘Centrino Duo’ and ‘Centrino Pro’ models from Intel are more powerful than ever, but AMD has been slowly catching up. Intel once had a 90% share of the laptop/notebook processor market, but today that lead is 80%, with AMD holding almost all of the rest.

After AMD purchased ATI, they started working on a notebook-class processor with onboard ATI graphics processor and accompanying chipset, leaving the wireless Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n module to third party providers, unlike Intel which usually bundles its own Wi-Fi chipset into the Centrino mix.
Although AMD has lagged Intel on notebook-class processor power, AMD’s most recent dual core Turion 64 X2 notebook processors coupled with the new onboard ATI graphics has seen AMD start to catch up in the notebook performance stakes, once again presenting an ever sharper thorn in Intel’s side.

But AMD’s success isn’t across the board, gaining use by some manufacturers in low and mid range desktop and notebook PCs, with use of Intel’s across-the-board range of processors still proving popular with manufacturers – and the public, although AMD has almost always offered a price advantage, especially at the low to mid-range.

Toshiba has said they expect 20% of their range will offer AMD processors in both the US and Europe by the northern summer, and follows Dell’s long expected adoption of AMD processors.

What AMD needs to do now is continue improving its notebook processor and chipset solution, ramping up performance to show they can solidly compete with Intel’s powerful Core 2 Duo processors at the mid-range to the high-end, but for now, this is a good start, and the type of win they need to keep on keeping Intel on their toes.
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