MSI Unveils AMD-Powered Tablet

AMD's old CEO Dirk Meyer was reportedly ousted for being slow to jump on the ultra lower-power bandwagon as Intel has been working on doing for a while now. However, AMD can't be counted out entirely, as their low-power Fusion APUs have been shown to be quite potent. MSI is putting this to the test, unsheating a tablet packing a dual-core 1Ghz AMD Ontario APU. This will be one of the options on their interestingly-configurable WindPad tablet.

MSI has showed off the WindPad tablets before, but now it is revealed there will be several different versions. The 10.1" tablet will have one option with an Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC running Android, and two options with x86 processors running Windows 7. One option will be the above 1Ghz AMD APU, which also packs a Radeon HD 6250, and the other will be an Intel Atom Z530 1.66Ghz single-core CPU. The Intel system might feel a bit snappier, but in multi-threaded tasks the AMD solution will certainly give the Intel CPU a run for its money, and the APU certainly has better game than the Intel integrated.

At the least this throws another player into the market, making it more competitive than it already is, which is always good news for consumers.