Techpowerup: Toshiba ready with AMD Fusion Brazos netbook

[cbn]

Looks like the first Bobcat netbook specs are popping up.

Link Here

Toshiba joined the small but growing group of PC manufacturers ready with a netbook powered by AMD's upcoming Fusion "Brazos" platform. Revealed by Toshiba Germany, the NB550D is a 10.1-inch netbook driven by AMD C-50 Fusion APU with two processor cores clocked at 1.00 GHz, carrying AMD Radeon HD 6250 DirectX 11 compliant graphics. It is backed by 1 GB of memory, 250 GB of storage, connectivity that includes WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, and gigabit Ethernet. The unit itself weighs 1.32 kg, comes in three bezel color options: orange, green and brown. It embeds a VGA webcam, and is powered by a 6-cell battery. At full charge, the battery can run the netbook for up to 9.5 hours. It comes with Windows 7 Starter pre-installed. It should be released along with most other Fusion Brazos netbooks, in Q1-2011.

I don't like the looks (bezel, color options), but the battery life sounds strong for a dual core machine with a 80 stream GPU.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm very curious to see how the CPU compares to Atom D5xx, and how well the 6250 can run older games at low resolutions.

 

[frostedflakes]

Battery life looks pretty solid for a 6-cell, comparable to advertised life for Atom-based netbooks. CPU is clocked pretty low, but I recently messed around with an AMD V105 (1.2GHz) based netbook and it was pretty snappy. It was interesting because the V105 seemed to compare pretty well with the 1.66GHz Atom in benchmarks (V105 was a bit faster in single-threaded tasks, and then Atom pulled ahead a bit in multi-threaded tasks due to HyperThreading probably), but subjectively it felt a good bit faster just for web browsing and stuff like that. More flash heavy sites that lagged kind of bad on Atom-based netbooks I had used before seemed to run smoother. Maybe the better IGP (AMD 4250) is what made the difference.

So as long as performance is comparable with Atom and actual (not advertised) battery life is on-par with Atom based netbooks, I think AMD might have a real winner here. Can't wait to see reviews on these.

 

[cbn]

So as long as performance is comparable with Atom and actual (not advertised) battery life is on-par with Atom based netbooks, I think AMD might have a real winner here. Can't wait to see reviews on these.

Some rumor websites are claiming lower battery life (6 hours) for another brand's 6 cell Ontario C-50 model. So it will be interesting to see how the actual benchmarks/tests pan out for each particular model.

 

[EliteRetard]

Atom has been out for a few years, it hasnt changed, and its performance is no longer acceptable. If AMD has spent this long just catching up to Atom Id consider it a major fail. This 1GHz chip needs to beat all versions of atom in all the tests and the higher clocked chips need to be significantly faster, like 50% or more over Atom without eating the battery. And they should be price competitive, Im not paying $500+ for a netbook.

Hell I just got someone an i3 laptop with 2GB/320GB for 430$ new and it gets 4hrs.

Yes Im being serious.

 

[EliteRetard]

And you might say i3 and Atom arent comparable...

My point exactly. The i3 is vastly superior, its only missing out on the battery life and size factors. It might be overkill, but for 100$ more you get a massively improved laptop experience that can actually be reccomended to people. Atom cant even run tax software. There is a serious need for some middle ground, many people dont need an i3 but there is currently nothing else below that which is useable and gives a battery and size improvement. Atom is literally not even good enough for a kids toy...Ive seen them struggle with mahjong.

 

[frostedflakes]

Well size and battery life are the main reasons people buy a netbook. Most people have a good desktop for doing their taxes and other more demanding stuff on, and then a netbook is just something cheap and small you can carry around for getting on the internet and other basic tasks.

But anyway, CULV netbooks/ultraportables fill that middle ground.

 

[cbn]

And you might say i3 and Atom arent comparable...

My point exactly. The i3 is vastly superior, its only missing out on the battery life and size factors. It might be overkill, but for 100$ more you get a massively improved laptop experience that can actually be reccomended to people. Atom cant even run tax software. There is a serious need for some middle ground, many people dont need an i3 but there is currently nothing else below that which is useable and gives a battery and size improvement. Atom is literally not even good enough for a kids toy...Ive seen them struggle with mahjong.

No, I see your point completely.

Yes, It appears (looking at the total purchase price of laptops) costs at the chip level for atom/bobcat and SV Arrandale are getting closer together.

So with Bobcat the focus needs to be on battery life otherwise someone might think a few extra dollars are better spent on a faster Intel CPU (built on a smaller process).

Intel knows (in certain circumstances) battery life rather than raw performance is capable of supporting premium pricing otherwise they wouldn't be able to command such high prices for their low voltage Arrandale chips (i7 640um, etc).

With that being said the real wild card here IMHO is the extra GPU AMD attaches to Bobcat. Do most customers really want that? Or would they have ironically have paid more money for the netbook if a smaller GPU were included? We'll have to see how the testing bears this strategy out.

 

[Hacp]

Atom has been out for a few years, it hasnt changed, and its performance is no longer acceptable. If AMD has spent this long just catching up to Atom Id consider it a major fail. This 1GHz chip needs to beat all versions of atom in all the tests and the higher clocked chips need to be significantly faster, like 50% or more over Atom without eating the battery. And they should be price competitive, Im not paying $500+ for a netbook.

Hell I just got someone an i3 laptop with 2GB/320GB for 430$ new and it gets 4hrs.

Yes Im being serious.

The AMD chip does beat all versions of the atom. It is superior in everything but probably video encoding. I heard the pricepoint for the chip would be similar to the atom netbooks. Basically think of the AMD platform as a cheap version of the CULV platform with a weaker cpu but stronger graphics.