Laptop Thoughts: Finally! Competition with the Atom!

"The system I tested had AMD’s E-350 processor, the highest end APU you’ll find on a Brazos. This is the chip you’ll find in $400 nettops and notebooks in the $400 - $500 range. This puts its direct competition as really expensive Atom based netbooks, Pentium dual-core notebooks and low end Core i3 notebooks. While the latter two should easily outperform the E-350 in CPU intensive tasks, the GPU comparison is another story entirely."

It has been a few years, but it looks like Intel's competitors have finally put some attention to the netbook and related markets and presented some decent competition. Both VIA and AMD have their own entries, with AMD's Brazos Lineup appearing to be quite a beast. It does appear to be a bit more of an energy vampire, but with those few extra watts comes a lot of extra oomph. I am really pleased to see that while the CPU is no slouch, they have not ignored the GPU. Even without an interest in gaming, a powerful GPU is useful for a lot of other tasks such as video editing and playback. Now that Flash supports hardware acceleration, a decent GPU only becomes more important. The numbers tell an interesting tale, and it almost suggests that the Atom is really becoming long in the tooth, and if Intel improved their Core i3 line a bit, it would actually be the best competitor for the netbook space.