AMD Ontraio Netbook Chips May Ship in Q4 2010

AMD has been noticeably absent from most of the netbook developments over the past few years of their existence. It's safe to assume that they wanted to allow more time for the netbook market to mature before devoting resources to chip development (after all they are smaller than Intel). Now we can tell AMD is much more serious about the netbook market now with their new Ontario platform set to take on Intel's Atom chipset head on. Being a fan of competition between businesses I believe things will continue to evolve in the netbook market moving forward which will all work towards benefiting us (the consumers). Without mentioning any specifics the CEO of AMD Dirk Meyer said the chips would offer performance similiar to the Athlon II dual core notebook processor; however, it will include significantly higher graphics capabilities than Intel's Atom line of chips.

Needless to say, Intel will surely have an answer for the AMD chipsets when they're released but in the mean time we can always enjoy the power provided by Nvidia ION 2 based netbooks. The Ontario based netbooks likely won't be available for purchase until Q1 2011.

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