14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may hold a very large chunk of the central processing unit market, but Advanced Micro Devices has been holding its own by playing the affordability card, and it seems that vendors were especially interested in its CPUs last year.
Until the middle of 2010, AMD had a distinct disadvantage in the fact that it lacked an actual collection of mobile processors.
After it finally remedied this situation, low prices compared to Intel's own offerings enabled it to score quite a few design wins, even some major ones, so to speak.
The mobile quad-core CPUs from the Phenom series were those that saw the most success among PC suppliers.
As some end-users may know, the cheapest Intel notebook running a quad-core processor has a price of about 750 Euro.
While Intel loyalists are abundant, the fact remains that the price difference is still a bit high, as AMD quad-core notebooks cost about the same as Intel dual-core ones.
For instance, the Lenovo Z565 is, currently, one of, if not the cheapest such machine, bearing a price of as little as 549 Euro.
At that price, one wouldn't expect much, but the 2 GHz Phenom N930 is used inside a 15.6-inch frame and paired with the Radeon HD 5470 graphics, plus 500 GB storage and 4 GB RAM.
Needless to say, this laptop found itself quite well looked upon, considering how close its price tag falls to that of netbooks.
Meanwhile, the Acer Aspire 5533 also captivates with its price of 550 Euro, being made of more or less the same components as above, only without the discrete graphics solution.
All in all, Advanced Micro Devices managed to get its chips noticed by PC vendors and, while Intel does still power most of the world's portable machines, the former still wins in terms of bargains.