AMD undercuts Intel for Toshiba laptops

Wednesday 30th May 2007, 02:02:00 PM, written by Arun

AMD and Toshiba have announced that Turion 64 X2 CPUs will be used in one fifth of future Toshiba laptops that should be available around July, because of their lower prices. Toshiba only sold Intel CPUs in the past seven years. In related news, AMD stated that they will slash Opteron 1S prices by 10 to 50%.

Toshiba is a significant notebook design win for AMD's CPU business, as Toshiba is the 4th largest notebook OEM and controls nearly 10% of the market. As such, one fifth of that represents 2% of the overall notebook market, which is quite significant for AMD.

Traditionally, that market is quite appealing as it has higher margins than the desktop market. However, with Toshiba focusing primarily on the cost benefits of using AMD chips, this could imply that their margins there might not be so great this time around, as they are merely competing on price again Intel. This design win might also be a direct benefit of the ATI merger, as it looks like AMD is bundling the M690, aka RS690G, with the CPU.

It definitely looks like AMD is ready to compete on price to capture back the marketshare it lost to Intel in Q1 2007, with all that entails. AMD was more drastic than Intel in terms of cutting the prices of its desktop CPUs in April too, and it also looks like the company will aggressively be cutting the prices of 1S Opteron servers on June 4th.


Discuss on the forums

Tagging

amd ± intel, toshiba, laptops, opterons

Related amd News

RWT Analyzes Bulldozer Benchmarks
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD launches FireStream 9250 with 200Gflops DP via RV770
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners