Too good to be true?
So what Haas is saying is that we can now put an unfettered 9400M notebook IGP into a netbook and only increase the power demands by a quarter. This means that it can be used in even the smallest varieties and Haas confirmed that it would be conceivable to see it in a $300 system.
When we suggested that this sounds a bit too good to be true, Haas responded: "This is potentially a fundamental shift in price/performance; a disruptive development."
If Ion does deliver in the way Haas suggests then this can't be great news for AMD and its Yukon platform, which AMD is hoping is going to carve out a niche for itself by providing affordable thin and light notebooks with decent graphics.
"Frankly we're happy to see AMD in this space because competition is always good," said Hass diplomatically, but added: "an Ion/Atom system will have a much lower TDP than what AMD is offering."
When we asked Haas to summarise his expectations for Ion, he unwittingly paraphrased our own Mr Sandhu. "We think it's going to do really, really well," he said.
Of course we'll make up our own mind when we get our hands on one, and we hope to bring you an AMD response to this launch soon, but our initial impression is that this could indeed be a disruptive development.
