Dell Offers Its Second AMD Notebook

Dell announced Nov. 6 that it would begin to offer its second notebook that uses Advanced Micro Devices processors.

The Latitude 131L notebook comes with either AMDs Turion 64 X2 TL-50 dual-core processor with a starting price of $649, or the Sempron 3500+ processor, which starts at $549, according to Dell.

The new notebook line will start selling on Dells Web site on Nov. 7, a company spokesperson told eWEEK.

Dells latest notebook offering comes less than a week after the company began advertising its Inspiron 1501 notebook—the first in the companys line of notebooks that offers AMD processors.

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For years, Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, only offered Intel processors in its notebooks, desktops and servers. That change came after company executives announced a new series of initiatives, called Dell 2.0. Part of the changes included offering PCs and serves with AMD processors.

Click here to read more about how Dell plans to reinvent itself with its 2.0 initiative.

Those changes started happening on Sept. 13, when Dell announced it would offer its E521 and C521 desktops with AMD processors. A month later, on Oct. 23, the company said some of its servers would be based on AMDs Opteron processor.

These two announcements come at a time when the company has seen its market share decrease. In October, two separate studies by the research firms Gartner and IDC showed that among PC makers, Dell had lost its first-place standing in the third quarter to rival Hewlett-Packard.

In addition to the Sempron and Turion 64X2 dual-core processors—both processors run at 1.6GHz—the Latitude131L comes with 256MB of memory that can be upgraded to 2GB, a standard 40GB hard drive and a variety of optical drives that ranges from the 24X CD ROM to the 24XDVD/CD/RW.

Click here to read more about how HP did versus Dell in the third quarter.

Unlike the Inspiron, which is designed more for the companys consumer base, the 131L notebook is geared toward small businesses.

"Ideally, its for a business with either one or two employees up to a couple of dozen people," the spokesperson said.

Dell executives see the 131L notebook as a natural progression from some of the other business-centered PCs it has offered.

When Dell rolled out the AMD-based Inspiron 1501 on its Web site on Nov. 2, the company did not formally announced that it had launched the new line.

The company spokesperson said both new notebooks were being officially launched on Nov. 6, although the company has already started taking orders for the Inspiron.

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