Monday, 06 September 2010 09:07
AMD's Bobcat to be real competition to Atom
Written by Fuad Abazovic
Industry sources again
Things are picking up for AMD. They have one good thing going for them and it's called Bobcat, AMD's version of Atom. AMD will even go beyond as it promises sub-1W consumption and it should come in early 2011. Intel's all integrated Atom with CPU and GPU on a same die comes only in late 2011.
And in the meantime AMD has Fusion, its first Bobcat core powered with Radeon graphics, that will be good enough for the start but we are not certain if it will support DirectX 11. This is still way better than Atom graphics that cannot even handle HD video. AMD will deliver fluent HD playback and even full HD should be possible. The thing is that Intel has more power of branding and power in general over AMD and Intel will definitely get more design wins.
Intel has its first dual core Atom for netbooks shipping today and Atom won't get much better over the next year and a quarter, which is a good thing for AMD. Intel will still be able to secure design wins due its famous MDF (Market Development Fond) that makes many things much easier. The good thing for AMD is that its product might be technically better.
It’s been some time since AMD had a better product than Intel in any market segment, but we still need to see the battery life as this is where Intel always had the upper hand.
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