Toshiba said it would buy microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices, ending its exclusive ties with Intel.
Toshiba, the world’s fourth-largest laptop PC maker, said on Tuesday it expects to put AMD processors in about 20 percent of the notebooks it sells in the United States and Europe.
The move follows an announcement last year by Dell, the world’s second-largest PC maker that had been procuring microprocessors only from Intel for more than two decades, that it would begin using chips from AMD.
Toshiba will install AMD chips in some models to be released this summer, enabling it to reduce parts-procurement costs by at least 10 percent.
There’s some “market analysis” in the article – almost up to biz journalism 101. The event is still worth noting.
“Wow! That credit card number I found on the Web is still good.”
I’ve a 14 year old Toshiba notebook running W3.11 that still works fine and is used infrequently for word processing and spreadsheet detail. Too bad the battery is gone (who’d guess after 14 years), but the machine is still great. Anyone remember PC-Tools? I wonder what difference it makes what brand processor they use, isn’t this about low end machines?
2. – BubbaRay,
I got issued a Toshiba notebook back in 1990 and it was considered near the top of the line at the time. It had DOS on it, it was a bit bigger than a real notebook, it had a reddish-orange screen and you could safely put it through the X-ray machine at the airport. That was back when Compaq was selling ‘notebooks’ that looked like suitcases. I don’t think AMD was around back then.
Oh yeah, it had Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and PC-Tools and it was faster and more reliable than my current P4 with XP on it – but not faster or more reliable than my P4 with Ubuntu on it.
Who makes the CPU in my computer matters to me as much as who makes the caffeine in my Coke. I honestly can’t tell any difference.
BubbaRay – The PCTools company is still alive and kicking.
http://www.pctools.com/
#3, #5, anybody remember an old program called Sidekick? Boy, I used the heck out of that one for coding, debugging, etc. It was very cool for its day, and still works on my old trusty Toshiba.
#4, Greg, that’s just the way I feel about it, as long as it reliably runs the software I use, who cares?
Sure I remember Sidekick. I may be wrong but I think it was program that ever allowed me to “multi task” on a computer, which in this case was my homebrewed DOS 8088.
Wikipedia has a nice entry on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick
Sometimes I marvel at how much usefulness we got from low computing power back then.
OK, no photos, music and video but productivity software like spreadsheets and word processors had all the main functionality that I still need today.
6. BubbaRay,
I do recall Sidekick and I did have a copy at one time but for some reason I don’t recall using it much. Most of my early programming was on a DEC PDP-11 then a VAX, so I guess I was using VMS tools. As time passes, some things from the past become clearer and some things go all fuzzy, neh?
#8, Fred Flint, I remember having to boot the old PDP-11 from the console switches. Now *that’s* ancient computing. Cheese, I think I could bring one up now faster than booting this dual-core with XPSP2. At least it had really cool lights on the front panel, like my old IMSAI.