Posted on Tuesday, May 29 2007 @ 16:08 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Toshiba announced it will end its exclusive relationship with Intel for its notebook computers. From now on,
Toshiba will start shipping about 20 percent of its notebooks in Europe and the U.S. with AMD processors.
"With PCs becoming commodity products, there seems to be a new way of thinking that competition should be introduced even in procurement of such core parts like processors as long as there are no major differences in product specifications," Macquarie Securities analyst Yoshihiro Shimada said.
"This could be a message that an era in which Intel took the lion's share of microprocessor profits as the king of PC chips is over."
Toshiba plans to put AMD chips in moderate-priced standard models for individual and corporate clients, Toshiba spokeswoman Yuko Sugahara said.
The Nikkei business daily reported earlier that prices of AMD-equipped PCs are expected to sell for up to 10,000 yen ($82) less than comparable models.
