Toshiba to Power NB550 Netbook with an AMD Radeon-Packing 1GHz APU
Dec 30, 2010 01:22 PM EDT by 
First Acer, then MSI, now Toshiba co-signs next-generation accelerated processors from Intel’s chipset rival AMD.
The NB550D netbook appeared on Toshiba Germany‘s website this week carrying a sparkly new 1GHz AMD C50 APU.
You may recall the AMD Ontario family of next-gen netbook chipsets comes complete with video graphics on the CPU die. In the case of the NB550D, the C50 APU includes Radeon HD 6250M video graphics (along with other specs like 1GB of DDR3 RAM and 250GB shock absorbing HDD).
The added graphics muscles will certainly help power the NB550D’s HDMI output, as well as its two-channel audio from the separated Harman-Kardon speakers that reside in the netbook’s palm rest.
Over in the battery life department, Ontario sucks down just nine watts of power and Toshiba estimates the NB550D to last 9.5 hours of run time.
Notebook Italia points out that the Intel Atom version of this netbook can stand on its feet for 10 hours. That’s a little less, but a 30-minute drop-off isn’t too shabby when you throw in the performance boost from Radeon graphics.
Despite the fact that the Toshiba NB520, a different config of the NB550D, launched in Singapore earlier this month, there’s still no word on stateside availability for any versions of the machine, but we’ll see what comes out of CES next week.
Via Notebook Italia and Engadget
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