Toshiba NB550D – AMD Fusion Pre-Order. Unboxed, Tested for Video Performance Too

Are you waiting to see how that 1Ghz dual-core AMD Fusion platform benchmarks before buying your next 10 inch device? I am. As someone who’s had a netbook for nearly two years now I am probably in the same boat as millions of other people I’m looking for an upgrade. I’m not buying until i’ve assessed Fusion though which means I’m scouring the web for information every day.

I’ve seen reports on the 1.6Ghz dual-core Zacate E-Series devices but they’re not targeted at the 10 inch segment. The one that’s going up against the Atom is the Ontario series. The C-50 being the dual-core 1.0Ghz version, the C-30 the single-core 1.2Ghz version. While the latter has been benchmarked, its the C-50 that is more interesting for day-to-day work.

Background on the C-series ‘APU’s’

The Toshiba NB550D has just hit the German online channels in the last week and is showing up for around 325 Euro (lowest price.) which puts it head to head with the ASUS EeePC 1015PN (with ION graphics.) The question is, which platform has the better day-to-day performance. The two platforms has a similar total TDP but the AMD part is going to be a lot better in 3D and HD video performance. With Flash 10.1 and HTML5 canvas elements taking advantage of GPU, the AMD advantage might be more significant that it first seems for non-gamers. For gamers, the advantage is clear.

Enough of the pre-amble. What have I found?

Well we’ve got a price as mentioned above. It’s Windows Starter 7 and 1GB of RAM for the 325 Euro price which doesn’t impress me so assume a 400+ price for 2GB and Windows 7 HP. The EeePC comes in at a minimum of 429 with those specs. That’s the entry point you want to be looking at if you’re upgrading though.

Secondly, we’ve got some unboxing pics.

The unboxing comes via eprice (translation link) and there are more images available. The keyboard reminds me instantly of the one on the Toshiba AC100. That’s good. I like the look of the speakers too.

Unfortunately the author doesn’t go as far as to benchmark the device (although I’d expect it to happen soon) but there are some YouTube tests. I’m looking at the results thinking, hmmm, that’s very similar to what I saw on the Samsung N350. The 720p videos are playing with >50% CPU load.

720P video playback time when most of the water is running between 56 to 68% will go to 7X% or even to 9X% off

All I can say at the moment is that given the C-30 performance data and this YouTube performance data it’s going to be a very close match between the CPU performance of the C-50 and N550 but as I said earlier, if you get the extra 3D performance and it translates to noticeable improvements in web and UI speed, Cedar Trail is going to have to really bump up the GPU performance in order to compete. (Unless, of course, it brings in significant power savings. Intel’s Oaktrail platform indicates that it might.)

Let’s keep an eye out for more data points, and battery life figures, over the next week.