As per a couple of new listings in Austria and Germany, Lenovo is arranging to launch a refresh of the ThinkPad Edge. This time round, the internals will pack AMD hardware. More particularly, the CPU will be based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture, part of the company’s Kabini platform.
The listing reveals a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E145 powered by 1.4 GHz dual-core E1-2500 AMD APU. AMD E1-2500 is basically a dual-core processor with a CPU clock frequency of 1.4 GHz and an integrated Radeon HD 8240 graphics adapter with 128 Stream processors and a 400 MHz frequency of its own.
It is not being exactly considered a very powerful platform, but certainly better than the others we’ve seen, and the GPU definitely exceeds Intel’s alternatives.
Nevertheless, the reason Lenovo didn’t trouble with some sort of super APU, like the A-Series, is simple: the ThinkPad Edge E145 was never supposed to be all that powerful. You get an 11.6″ 1366 x 768 display, 4 GB of RAM and 500 gigs of storage. It doesn’t make any sense of including a strong APU and GPU when LCD can’t even display full HD images. It does have wireless support WiFi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0). Unnecessary to mention but USB 3.0 is available as well (a pair of ports are present on the sides).
We are not sure about the prices yet. Most likely it will stay close around $500 / €500, or a bit below that. According to sources shipments will begin in two weeks or so.
Source: TechEYE | News Archive
