We've
always said AMD should go after the gaping hole between netbooks and thin-and-lights by releasing a low-power platform with solid graphics abilities, and it looks like the company's finally coming around -- AMD's John Taylor just told us that the chipmaker will be releasing a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid codenamed "Ontario" with integrated DX11 graphics sometime next year. If Ontario sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it
leaked in the past -- it's a part of the "Brazos" platform built around the low-power
Bobcat core. Of course, AMD has been
promising Fusion chips of all stripes for
years now without a single
shipping part, so saying that a Fusion chip will get it into the netbook game in 2011 is mildly amusing -- while AMD's definitely turned things around, it's still incredibly late to the low-end party, and Intel's solidly beaten it to the hybrid CPU / GPU punch with the Core 2010 and Pine Trail Atom chips. Add in the fact that NVIDIA's
Optimus-based
Ion 2 chipset seemingly offers the extended battery life of Atom with the performance of a discrete GPU, and we'd say the market niche Ontario is designed to fill may not actually be so niche when it finally arrives. We'll see what happens -- a year is a long, long time.
[Image via
OCWorkbench]
posted March 11th 2010 9:06PM
Johnny come lately!
I love AMD by the way.
Hee hee, Ontario. I like that.
@p0p0
Its the province in which I live in =)
@Seb6554
Me too
@Sneakz Me three :)
WHY NEXT YEAR???!!!
AMD WTF @*^$(&@(q$&!#@(&%$#!@($%@# BLAH
They going south now - Sabine and Brazos being Texan rivers.
'Bout time AMD
@J1024
Exactly what I was thinking, AMD almost mad me M_A_D
@seanGadget
lol u mad?
@seanGadget
^.^ I see what you did there...
Yay, a Canadian city is the codename! So if I'm understanding this, Bobcat is the name of the CPU core itself, and Ontario is the whole APU?
@Nitesh Might want to brush up on that Canadian geography ;)
@Nitesh it could be named after the city here in California
@jonnythan Well fuck me sideways, don't know how I messed that up :-P
I'll go into hiding now, the shame is too much to bear.
@Nitesh There was also the "Montreal" chip on their server roadmap :D
@Murkurie
Except for the fact that that city is named after the Province of Ontario.
From the Wikipeida page for Ontario, California:
"They named the settlement after their home province of Ontario, Canada."
So even if it's named after the city in California, it's really named after the province.
@Nitesh it very well could be Canadian. Considering ATi Headquarters were (are?) in Canada, Ontario, Markham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies
Man its like they just thought about this yesterday......wonder why
A assume you're referring to the hole they've been filling for the last year with the Neo chips?
@KeegdnaB The Neo chips are for thin-and-light laptops -- nothing under 12 inches. And they generate enough heat to power a small city of people who melt things for a living.
@Nilay Patel
THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!
C'mon Nilay, they weren't bad, just uncompetitive...
...and will AMD finally be shipping 32nm CPUs by then?
@gerrrg
Looking at the roadmap, AMD should in fact have 32nm by then. The problem with both AMD and Intel is that they take so long to phase out old technologies.
They'll get there right as the netbook is overrun by the thin and lights dropping in price to where the netbook makes little sense. Way to be reactionary, AMD.
Well even if it comes next year with Dx11 I think it will have an advantage.
You can almost guarantee that Intel wont have a graphics chipset which would be competitive.
The only game in town is Nvidia+Intel which would be extremely difficult to achieve for Nvidia considering its huge chipset size compared to AMD/Ati for Dx11. It will take a huge amount of engineering effort on Nvidia's part to reduce it to a low power version in the time set given.
With the condition of the market, I still think AMD has a chance to distinguish itself. Of course, price would be the biggest hurdle. I actually want AMD to enter the laptop market with good processors/graphics along with low power.
@arnavdesai Nvidia dosen't have any mobile Dx11 graphics yet.
@geegee
Nvidia doesn't have ANY DX11 graphics yet.
Heeeeeeeres Johnny!
sweet
I love AMD, I had an Athlon 64 X2 back when they smoked intels pentium junk. Now though I run core i7 cause its the best.... I wish AMD would quit playing catchup and take back the lead performance-wise
ATI might by king of the hill but AMD sure isn't, it's time to step it up AMD!
Forget 2011, it's 2010 ... where's my two core "nile" netbook with discrete DX11 graphics?
Even cheaper netbooks! Yey...Love AMD
I'm actually pretty excited about this part, I hope AMD manages to make something that's competitive in terms of power consumption which is were their mobile parts always sucked. A Low TDP CPU with on-die H.264 decoding and WoW capable GPU would make a great netbook or HTPC.
I think it has been proven many times that it is no problem being late to the party as long as you arrive in style. AMD has no interest in delivering a fusion that can only deliver the GPU-power the i3-i7 can today.
AMD may have something from a price point advantage, which is usually there place in the market. Atom+ION2 may deliver good graphics performance, but at a higher price point. Almost any ION power netbook is significantly more expensive then a vanilla Intel GPU powered machine spec for spec. If AMD can bring in a ION2 level performance for the cost of a Intel powered graphics model I see them taking some market share.