Three New Toshiba Satellites to Feature AMD Turion 64 X2 CPUs
Late yesterday, AMD was finally able to confirm what a Toshiba spokesperson leaked two days ago to the Japanese business press: Toshiba will indeed ship notebook computers that include AMD processors.
Today, we can absolutely refute reports that Toshiba selected AMD's low-end line: The world's #4 notebook manufacturer will go with AMD's media-savvy M690 chipset announced last March, and the latest Turion 64 X2 dual-core models announced earlier this month.
The M690 is AMD's first chipset to incorporate Avivo video processing technology from ATI, now its graphics division.
Though Toshiba is still officially silent on the matter, AMD is saying three new Satellite models will bear the CPU manufacturer's "Better By Design" logo, which is its current "mix-and-match" counterpart to Intel's Centrino platform, letting OEMs make a variety of design choices rather than conform to strict platform specifications.
Together, the Turion 64 X2 and the M690 produce a mid-range platform, geared towards professionals as opposed to gamers and enthusiasts, but who may need superior video performance nonetheless.
ATI's Avivo technology includes on-board support and acceleration for decoding MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and VC1 video codecs, the latter two being the most important for HD DVD playback, which we can expect to see in more mainstream Toshiba notebooks.
We don't know the precise buildouts just yet, so we aren't able to estimate street prices. But a current check of these new Satellites' competition in the M690 category reveals HP's Compaq 6515b and Compaq 6715b, which address the mid-range to performance business markets.
If you exclude the low-end Sempron CPU option - which Toshiba chose to do, perhaps wisely - you can find a 6515b pre-loaded with Vista Business, an M690T chipset, 1 GB of DDR2, and a 120 GB drive for about $1,200.
Satellites typically carry a bit of a premium. Expect a higher-class ATI graphics processor and built-in support for a municipal-area broadband standard, such as HSDPA.
In a comparable buildout to HP's Compaqs with such support, an Intel Centrino-based Toshiba Satellite may have a street price of around $1,500. Such a model would throw in some of Toshiba's typical business extras, such as a built-in fingerprint reader and hardware-based system security. But a comparably equipped, AMD-based Satellite would likely sell for at least $100 less in order for AMD to make its point.
So since we know Toshiba's producing three buildouts, we can predict the main business edition may sell for $1,400 on the street. With that as a baseline, a starter edition would probably have to sell for no more than $900, and a performance edition with Windows Ultimate and HD DVD could sell for around $1,600, assuming Toshiba adopts this product spread.
This week's Toshiba win puts AMD processors in the product lines of seven out of the world's top 10 manufacturers, and all of the top 5. In a statement to BetaNews this morning, an AMD spokesperson said, "Toshiba's adoption of the AMD mobile platform is one indicator of an irreversible trend of OEMs embracing choice and customers benefiting from industry-leading technologies. The Toshiba win follows Dell and Tong Fang (China's largest OEM) decisions to adopt AMD CPUs in 2006."
If this trend is indeed irreversible as AMD suggests, then since the M690 chipset is generally presumed to be the predecessor for its highly-anticipated "Puma" notebook platform, Toshiba will probably be among its early adopters. Puma is expected to utilize HyperTransport 3.0 for expediting fetches from memory, as well as a new hardware-supported low-power state for energy conservation. Puma will also support Microsoft DirectX 10 graphics, for the "full Vista experience;" the M690 is presently limited to DX9.
Though precise availability dates remain unknown as long as Toshiba itself doesn't chime in, AMD forwarded on Toshiba's promise of availability "in time for the back-to-school season," which is the optimum time to launch a new portable.