Bobcat starts biting into Atom's share of shelf space

Mar 28, 2012 12:43 GMT  ·  By

While netbooks may not be as popular today as they were two years ago, adding AMD’s graphics power into a new model may help ASUS transform their new U82U netbook into a best-seller.

Intel-based netbooks have always been lacking in CPU processing power and even more so in the graphics department.

Once AMD launched the Bobcat architecture, we’ve all hoped for a spur of AMD Brazos based netbooks, but these took a long time to appear as OEMs and brand makers don’t want to upset the almighty Intel.

Today Taiwanese company ASUS announces their new AMD netbook design on their Facebook page. It’s powered by AMD E-450 processor running at 1650 Mhz together with the Radeon HD 6320 iGPU using 2 GB of DDR3 RAM.

The memory is upgradeable to 8 GB and the netbook has 500 GB of storage on the HDD.

The novelty has three USB ports, of which two are USB 3.0 and one is USB 2.0. It also comes with an HDMI port and an eight-cell battery.

Based on what we know about Brazos, this netbook should perform much better than any Atom dual-core units that are similarly clocked.

The new toy weighs in at 1.84 Kg. That is around 4 pounds in imperial.

It has a 14-inch screen and a metallic finish and, at around 600$, it will be a cheap alternative to the Asus ZEN Book.