AMD To Launch Lower Cost Ultrabook Competitor Platform

Digitimes’ Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai report that as Intel gears up to launch its next-generation Ivy Bridge platform for Ultrabooks (and the MacBook Air) in April, hoping to lower the average Ultrabook price to US$799-999 with enhanced performance, AMD is getting set to launch in June its Trinity-based platform compete in the Ultrabook/MBA market. They say that AMD has codenamed its light-and-slim laptop catregory “Ultrathin,” and is projecting an overall cost 10-20% lower than for computers built to Intel’s Ultrabook spec., and to compete against Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPU family in 2012 and the next generation Haswell in 2013. Chen and Tsai note that the new AMD platform is expected to attract vendors such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer and Asustek Computer.

The Digitimes reporters say that 75 new ultrabooks based on Intel’s platform are expected in 2012, plus another 20 units based on AMD’s Ultrathin spec., although the latter are not anticipated to offer any significant innovations in terms of performance or function compared to Intel’s Ivy Bridge-based ultrabooks. Just a cost advantage of US$100-200 lower than Intel’s Ultrabooks.

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