Acer Aspire One 521, First Netbook based on AMD's New Platform

Though it may not have unleashed any CPUs for the mobile market for quite some time, Advanced Micro Devices seems to have finally managed to make a move in this area, as it has unveiled its VISION-based platforms at the Cannes Film Festival in France. One of the products that stood out more than the others was a certain single-core CPU known as the V105. Consumers may have guessed at its purpose and, now, Acer has come to confirm those suspicions in a move befitting of one who is preeminent on the netbook market.

The AMD V105 is a central processing unit with a core frequency of 1.2GHz, meant to be used in entry-level mobile PCs. Acer, being the main advocate of such devices, did not waste any time in making the best of this component. In fact, the company actually moved quickly enough to be the first to show off a laptop powered by this processor.

Known as the Acer Aspire One 521, the netbook essentially embodies AMD's solution meant to confer higher quality multimedia playback capabilities, including 1080p video playback, upon such systems. Though the CPU itself is not the fastest wonder child, it is paired with an ATI Radeon HD 4225 GPU. This combination makes short work of any media file. The configuration also includes 1GB of RAM and a hard disk drive with 160GB of storage space.

Of course, in order to let end-users truly enjoy HD video playback (impossible on the 1024 x 764-resolution, 10.1-inch LCD), Acer outfitted its netbook with VGA and HDMI outputs. Other connectivity and I/O options include three USB ports, a media card reader and Ethernet.

Unfortunately, there is, at this time, no information on when this mobile PC will start shipping or how much it will cost. Availability shouldn't be far off, however, considering that the model is already on display in Cannes, where we even managed to take a few close-up shots of it.

In addition to the Aspire one 521, Acer also showcased the Aspire One 721. This particular model is somewhat larger (11.6 inches) and runs on an Athlon II Neo K325 chip, clocked at 1.3GHz. This laptop also handles HD videos, but has a screen of a higher quality (1366 x 768 resolution).

Live report by Traian Teglet from Cannes Film Festival 2010 in Cannes, France.