AMD offers Vision Black laptops

Posted on 8 Jun 2010 at 14:44

AMD dropped a nugget of info about a previously unattempted future laptop segment, during its Computex 2010 keynote: AMD Vision Black Laptops.

Nothing more than the name was said at the time until we managed to squeeze ourselves into a tiny room filled with some of AMD's top brass a few days later. We were curious - given that "Vision Black" in a desktop PC means super-speedy, overclocking machines for high-tech gurus, backed up by oodles of cooling hardware, how is that, um, "Vision", going to fit into a portable and battery operated device?

AMD stated that it only offered product options and marketing material and it was up to the manufacturers to make it available. It stated that Acer had already taken up the chance to make a Vision Black laptop. AMD also pointed out that Asus, HP and Dell all currently make laptops with AMD quad-core processors inside, so could potentially upgrade their status from Vision Premium to Vision Black with not much effort (probably just a slight processor update).

We'll have to watch out for the Acer one then, but since AMD mobile quad cores are already 'high power' in all respects, we have to wonder if it'll also ship with a ceramic plate to put underneath? We still remember days of old where Pentium 4 laptops as thick as our fists and full of copper: these were more space heaters than portable computers and certainly not laptops.

Plus, we're still not entirely convinced that an overclockable laptop is what the user wants. After all, who would want to risk a £1,500+ laptop because they turned the dial too high? Hmm, inventive, innovative or fool-hardy? Time will tell.

Author: Richard Swinburne in Taipei

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