AMD CEO sees Netbooks going away

[Kalyan]

AMD CEO sees Netbooks going away

Advanced Micro Devices' chief executive predicts that Netbooks will eventually disappear. This thinking, though obviously favorable to AMD's strategy, isn't completely at odds with Intel's.

The lightweight HP Pavilion dv2, which uses the AMD Neo processor, is marketed as a notebook

"The distinction between what is a Netbook and what is a notebook is going to go away," AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said Thursday in the company's earnings conference call.

"There will be a continuum of price points and form factors," he said.

"Given the way Netbooks are configured today, consumers who want a notebook at those kind of (low) price points have to compromise and as a result don't enjoy a full PC experience, particularly around the graphics and media capability of the machine," Meyer said. "And likewise people who wanted a thin and light machine had to pay a lot of money, typically well over a thousand dollars."

Upcoming inexpensive ultra-thin notebooks will meet the need for a small, thin, lightweight laptop that is more powerful than a Netbook, Meyer said.

This sentiment is actually backed up to some extent by Intel's recent behavior. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, in that company's earnings conference call last week, spoke oddly of Netbooks in the past tense. He said the buzz around Netbooks at the Consumer Electronics Show "validates our view that (the market) had a high potential for growth and it was an exciting segment, in particular in this kind of economic environment." (Emphasis added.)

Whether this is tied to Intel's intention to bring out new mainstream Core architecture chips for inexpensive thin notebooks later in the year, is not clear. This chip platform could potentially suck a lot of the enthusiasm out of the Netbook market.

And Intel has small plans for its Atom processor in 2009. Aside from a tiny increase in processor speed and a slight improvement in graphics, nothing big is slated for the platform. Is the demise of the Netbook market as we know it today something both AMD and Intel agree on? We'll see.

source : cnet