AMD: losing the battle on all fronts

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Remember AMD Barcelona? Delayed and disappointing, the architecture behind AMD’s first Phenom chips finally turned up in November 2007, six months behind schedule, with performance that left us “a little underwhelmed” after months of anticipation – and that’s before it was compared against its Intel equivalents.

At the same time, Intel was preparing to release its Wolfdale-based Core 2 Duo processors, which appeared in January 2008 using the more efficient 45nm architecture – a key improvement over AMD’s 65nm chips. The result? Our review concluded that the new Core 2 Duo E8000-series “wipes the floor with the [older] E6000 series” and that Intel’s new processors were an “unqualified success”.

Fast forward three years, and the similarities are startling. (more…)

First look: the new 11.6in Packard Bell netbook

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Netbooks have fallen into a steady routine since their 2007 debut: get a small chassis, cram it with an Intel Atom processor and integrated graphics, and watch them fly off the shelves. However, Packard Bell’s latest attempt to crack the lucrative netbook market, the 11.6in “dot m”, is a little different.

A glance at the exterior suggests that little about the classic netbook formula has changed: the 11.6in screen has a native resolution of 1,366 x 768, the trackpad is small but has a decent pair of buttons and supports multitouch functions, and the keyboard is reasonably spacious but also felt quite spongy. Three USB ports, an Ethernet socket and D-SUB output aren’t exactly groundbreaking, either.

Peek under the hood, though, and Packard Bell’s latest looks far more interesting than the average Atom-based products that have flooded the netbook market.

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