The Toshiba NB550D might not look special from the outside, but it’s what’s inside that matters: it’s the first netbook we’ve seen to ditch Intel’s Atom in favour of Brazos, the low-power opening salvo of AMD’s Fusion line-up.
At its heart lies the Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), which combines the CPU, GPU, north bridge and memory controller all on to one compact 40nm die. Of the four Brazos APUs, we looked at the two Zacate nettop chips recently; the NB550D uses the AMD C-50, one of the two Ontario netbook chips. It has two CPU cores running at 1GHz, an integrated AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics core and a TDP of only 9W, so it looks ideally suited for a modern netbook.
Unfortunately, our benchmarks were hamstrung by the Toshiba’s steadfast refusal to install Sony’s Vegas Pro 10 – we can only surmise it’s a driver issue. Instead, we disabled all Vegas sections on both this netbook and an Atom N550 equivalent, and ran the remaining tasks to make a like-for-like comparison.
Intel’s Atom N550 has Hyper-Threading, which helped it complete our Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Cinebench tests a full 20% faster than the C-50. Across all tests, the C-50 was 15% slower on average, but it’s worth remembering this is despite each of its cores running at only 1GHz compared to the Atom’s 1.5GHz – a 33% reduction in clock speed. In our iTunes encoding test, the C-50 outperformed the Atom by 10%, and our application-switching test (minus Vegas) put the two neck and neck: the AMD took 90.7 seconds to complete the test; the Intel in 91.9 seconds.
Plus, thanks to the C-50’s out-of-order execution pipeline, our subjective experience was that the Toshiba NB550D felt every bit as responsive in daily use as any Atom netbook we’ve tested. For web browsing, tapping out an email or watching videos on BBC’s iPlayer, the AMD hardware is perfectly capable.
Not a great leap forward, then, but we haven’t got to the best bit yet – the integrated AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics core. Crysis is an unfair challenge to set a netbook, but installing TrackMania Nations Forever and running its built-in benchmark opened up a significant performance gap over the Intel integrated equivalent. Run at Medium detail and the standard netbook resolution of 1,024 x 600, the Toshiba managed an almost-playable average frame rate of 21fps, while the Intel netbook managed only 5fps.
With Flash 10.2 installed, the Toshiba handled YouTube 1080p video at more than twice the frame rate of the Atom, and it also played our 1080p MKV clips at the full 24fps – the Atom managed only 11fps. If you’re regularly watching video on a netbook, AMD clearly has an edge over Intel’s integrated graphics.
Crucially, Brazos manages to improve on the Atom’s graphics performance without crippling battery life. Our light-use battery test scrolls through a series of websites, occasionally closing and reopening the browser – everyday internet usage, in other words – and the NB550D kept motoring for a massive 9hrs 55mins. Few netbooks we’ve seen can top that.
The NB550D is about more than just the internals, and Toshiba has got the design basics right. The 1.27kg chassis feels sturdy, and the ergonomics are refined. Squeezing a usable keyboard into such a tiny chassis is always a challenge, but by shrinking the less important keys and keeping the alphanumeric keys as large as possible, the Toshiba succeeds. The trackpad is excellent, too, and we particularly liked the positioning of the wide, individual buttons on the chassis’ edge.
The glossy 10.1in display offers good contrast and colour reproduction, right up with the best we’ve seen. And the Toshiba is equally skilled when it comes to audio: the pair of harman/kardon speakers in the wristrest deliver enough volume and clarity to enjoy music without reaching for the nearest pair of headphones. There’s also an HDMI port, 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 3, a 250GB hard disk and an SD card reader.
Despite its unassuming exterior, AMD’s new hardware makes the Toshiba NB550D more interesting than your average netbook. Its raw application performance isn’t quite up with an Intel Atom N550 (which Toshiba sells in the otherwise identical NB520), but it’s a trade-off that many will accept for the far superior graphics power at Brazos’ disposal. To get the same from an Atom netbook you’ll need Nvidia Ion, too, and that will ensure you won’t get anything like the same battery life.
In fact, our only complaint is that it’s taken so long for AMD to produce something competitive that Intel has barely had to innovate. The Brazos invasion should change that.
