Toshiba Goes Turion

From Reuters:
"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".

Good news indeed if you're an AMD follower. Another major OEM brings AMD onboard to help increase AMD's mobile penetration. Bear in mind that Toshiba maintains a big chuck of the commercial business most of them are known to be very loyal customers since the late 90's.

I have always believed that AMD's mobile market share has yet to reach "thermodynamic equilibrium" - i.e., continue to grab marketshare to the point where natural market competition puts it to a halt. This is the reason for the rapid increase of AMD's market share in the mobile and server space a year and a half ago simply because they provided the volume while starting of from a very low percentage. Currently AMD's mobile share is limited by OEM acceptance and this skews the way AMD and Intel competes in price. Once Toshiba is fully on board we should see a more competetive mobile market.

As Toshiba will be introducing Turion in the mid to low segment, its easy to predict market share gains for AMD. The only draw back that comes to mind is the association of the AMD brand as the low cost alternative. Its not ideal but at its current state, I'm sure AMD is willing to play this all too familiar role.