'Fusion' chip on rise as Netbooks become un-Netbooks
So, is Fusion that much better than Atom?Let's put it this way: Though AMD's Fusion processors don't clobber comparable Atom chips in benchmarks, Fusion offers enough of a performance cushion over Atom for PC makers like Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo to create new designs. Sony and HP, among others, are using Fusion in 11.6-inch designs that are designated simply as small laptops.(See CNET review of HP Pavilion dm1Z with commentary about AMD's Fusion chip performance vis-a-vis Atom.)Not surprisingly, Intel disagrees about the demise of Netbooks--though in a phone interview Friday, the chipmaker's marketing chief said tablets are having some impact. "It is fair to say that if people have discretionary income and they're going to spend 500 or 600 dollars, it's a tablet today [which] could have been a Netbook a year ago. So, there's no question there's a substitution that could be happening there," said Tom Kilroy, a senior vice president and general manager at Intel's Sales and Marketing Group.And a couple of final thoughts about Netbooks: Apple is also doing its part to diminish the format. Though there's a gaping price difference between, let's say, a $300 Atom-based 10-inch Netbook and a $999 11.6-inch MacBook Air, Apple offers consumers a clearly superior choice to a Netbook. And let's not forget the Chromebook, a dark horse in all of this.These small (11- and 12-inch) Google Chrome OS-based laptops, due in June, are powered by Intel's latest dual-core Atom processors. Atom's performance characteristics are better suited to the Chrome OS than Microsoft's resource- and performance-intensive Windows 7, which runs (slowly) on all Netbooks today.
