Even though the big coming out party for AMD's Fusion APUs isn't scheduled until next week, a couple of manufacturers have already started showing off their Brazos-powered wares. Acer was the first out of the gate, and now MSI and Toshiba have followed suit by teasing their upcoming ultraportables.
At a quiet event in Taipei, MSI gave the press a look at some of its new products, and NetbookNews managed to spot an unassuming engineering sample of the Wind U270. Apparently the 11.6in laptop will sport a 1,366x768px display and be powered by a mystery 1.6GHz AMD CPU. Of course, it doesn't take a huge leap to realise that this is the dual-core Zacate E-350 APU, which integrates a low-end DirectX 11 Radeon GPU in a tidy 18W package.
The notebook also packed in 4GB DDR3 and a 320GB hard drive. While some of the finer details might change in the transition from engineering sample to retail model, we wouldn't be surprised to see a very similar laptop arriving in shops in the new year.
Although it was slightly less intentional, Toshiba Germany - courtesy of Notebook Italia - has also released some details on its first Fusion-powered PC. Instead of the Zacate APU - which we've seen quite a bit of - the NB550D will join the Acer AO522 in being equipped with the 9W dual-core Ontario C-50 chip, placing this 10in system definitively in netbook territory.
This means that - with the exception of the processor and graphical capabilities - the specs are standard netbook-fare, including the 1,024x600px display, 1GB RAM and Windows 7 Starter Edition. However, Tosh claims that the NB550D will manage to squeeze an Atom-matching 9.5 hours out of the six-cell battery, so there's hope that AMD has finally managed to overcome its longevity issues.
There aren't too many more details at this point, but we're sure there'll be plenty of information on these laptops - and many, many more - floating around next week at CES.
