AMD Fusion

I needed to buy a small netbook recently for business purposes with the following requirements:

* Small and lightweight;

* Big enough screen/kbd to do some simple Microsoft Office editing;

* CPU can be slow, but must be fast enough to run MS Office/web browsing.

I knew the 2nd generation Intel Atom was out now, so that's what I figured I'd buy.

At my local store (I needed something immediately, otherwise I would've bought from the USA and easily saved some dollars), there were plenty of Atom-based netbooks, but they all had fairly awful screens (10 inch, but resolution was 800x600 I think).  Anyway, I found a very enthusiastic (and refreshingly honest) sales dude who steered me in the direction of the Acer 522 netbook which I purchased.

It runs on AMD's new C50 fusion APU (combo CPU/GPU), has a 10 inch, 1280x720 screen (VERY nice!).  I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 4GB, and swapped the 250GB hard drive for a Kingston 64GB SSD (v100).

Despite Acer's poor reputation for build quality, this baby really looks great and is quite solid.  The keyboard is fine for touch typing.  The screen is great.  The CPU is slow although it's dual-core (compared to my gaming laptop which is a rocket), but definitely runs MS office apps with no trouble at all and it hasn't hindered any of the presentations I've delivered so far (ie it's not laggy at all).  The battery life is great too ... about 6 hours.

Anyway, I got a great laptop at a fairly cheap price.  But the REALLY SURPRISING THING...

the Fusion APU packs an amazingly little GPU as well.  I can stream wirelessly (wifi-N built in) and watch absolutely smoothly and crystal-clear any of my HD 720p shows and movies.  Absolutely no lag or stuttering.  I'm using VLC player on windows 7 -- the trick is, make sure you enable the GPU-assisted playback option under the settings (not enabled by default in VLC), and restart the playback (stop/play).

Price wise, not sure what the USA price is, but I did recently see an amazing deal at Target USA for the 11 inch version (the 722), 1366x768 for $250 including a $50 Target gift card.  $200 for the 11 inch version - incredible.

In closing, looks like netbooks are starting to get some teeth (at great prices), and this market will be interesting to watch especially when we see what ARM come out with later this year.