In absence of Intel's expensive CPUs, consumers can remember what a mainstream notebook is

Jul 5, 2012 12:11 GMT  ·  By

Intel may finally be considering a price cut on its CPUs, or on one of them, but Advanced Micro Devices still has an advantage on the mainstream market, even though the former is doing its best to divert consumer attention through heavy advertising.

Like others, we've been reporting on AMD's advances whenever we found them, and there is no shortage of them really, but the sheer volume of ads and reports about Intel-based products has managed to counterbalance that so far.

Granted, Intel has the high-end market firmly in grasp, but that only means that AMD only has to worry about the mainstream and low-end segments.

As it happens, the A and E series of accelerated processing units have been reeling quite a few companies in.

Case in point, Acer's subsidiary Packard Bell has launched the EasyNote TE, a system that costs only 400 Euro. That's $500 and £300-321, according to exchange rates.

The E1-1200 chip lies at the heart of the notebook, with its clock speed of 1.4 GHz and the integrated AMD Radeon HD 7310 graphics.

The amount of RAM (random access memory) wasn't specified outright, but we assume it's somewhere in the 2-4 GB range, probably the latter option.

At any rate, the integrated GPU mentioned above gets to show its mettle on a 15.6-inch HD display (1,366 x 768 pixels), unless the HDMI output is used, in which case any HDTV or auxiliary monitor will do.

The rest of the components are common: USB 3.0 (one port), USB 2.0 (two ports), LAN (probably Gigabit Ethernet), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, multi-gesture trackpad, integrated speakers and audio jacks.

Finally, Packard Bell managed to fit a hard drive into that small price tag we mentioned above. While the top option is 750 GB, the smallest should fit within that sum just fine. As for the case, it comes with a glossy black cover and silver finish on the palmrest.