Asus has just announced a new Eee PC that breaks from the Atom crowd and gets in bed with a processor from the AMD Geode family.
The Asus Eee PC 1201K will have a 12.1" display and will use the AMD Geode NX 1750 processor. The Geode range of chips is primarily designed for use with media players, traffic lights and other embedded systems, which makes this a very surprising move.
Compared with the Atom N450, the Geode NX 1750 really doesn't look very impressive. It is clocked at 1.4Ghz instead of the typical 1.6Ghz we are all used to, and has a tiny 256K of Level 2 caches which is half as much as the Atom chip.
I won't expect any breakthrough performance by the 1201K which is a bit of a shame given that it comes with a 12.1" 1366x768-pixel display which literally screams multi-tasking, high-def video playback and large-format image editing. All of which could benefit form a much quicker processor.
As yet, there's no news of when the 1201K will be released or what it'll cost. I expect it will be priced much lower than the Atom range to offset the poorer performance capability.
