AMD’s Nile thin and light notebook platform is nearly here

Acer is getting ready with Aspire One 521

IT LOOKS AS if AMD is getting ready to out its new thin and light notebook – read netbook competitor – chipset very soon, although we’d hazard a guess that the Nile system will be officially unveiled at Computex, or at least it seems like that will be the right time to do so. An Acer centric blog has gotten details of one of the first notebooks based on the Niles platform and it comes from Acer in the shape of the Aspire One 521.

The basic chassis design looks like an updated version of the current Aspire One 500 series, but with AMD bits inside in favours of Intel’s Atom platform. The base model is said to feature the upcoming ‘Geneva’ based V105 CPU which should be a 45nm single core part with a TDP of a mere 9W. As this is a single core CPU, we’d guess it will carry AMD’s Sempron brand, especially with a clock speed of a mere 1.2GHz and only 512KB of L2 cache.

The V105 CPU is said to be paired up with the new mobile M880G chipset, which makes sense, as AMD is already moving to its newer 800-series chipsets on the desktop side of things. AMD appears to have gone for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 name for the integrated graphics of this chipset, and it can share up to 384MB of system memory and supports UVD2. In all fairness there’s nothing too exciting about the AMD bits inside, although with a bit of luck we’ll see dual core CPUs in this 10-incher from Acer in due time.

Unlike most netbooks you’ll find an HDMI port on the Aspire One 521 and the M880G chipset should hopefully make HD video playback smooth. The battery life is said to be in the region of about seven hours, which is a huge improvement for a mobile solution from AMD, even at the entry level and even more so when you consider that Lenovo’s X100e with an Athlon Neo MV 40 is rated at five hours. AMD might be a little bit late to bring a thin and light platform with good battery life to the market, but we’re actually quite excited about Intel’s Atom platform finally getting some decent competition.S|A

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