AMD Trinity Powers Arctic MC101 Media Centers

You'd expect us to immediately start listing all the laptops based on the new accelerated processing units (APUs) from Advanced Micro Devices, but that's not what we're going to do.

Sure, we've already seen some notebooks here and there, but the landslide is only now about to start, assuming PC makers don't wait until the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (June 11-14). Still, we figured we'd start with something more unusual. Trinity chips really are good for a wide variety of products.

Arctic has made the official introduction of the MC101 Series all-in-one entertainment centers. One might say they qualify as computers as much as they fit the definition of media players. Design-wise, they are class-brushed silver-colored aluminum-housed devices with a thickness of just 32mm (1.25 inches).

Two heatsinks lie on the inside, dissipating the heat generated by whichever processor happens to be present. Speaking of which, prospective buyers can select between the AMD Trinity APU A10-4600M and the A8-4500M, which we’ve detailed here.

4 GB of DDR3 RAM are present, along with up to 2 TB of hard disk drive storage space, which can hold, in addition to the operating system, 2,600 films, 625,000 songs and over 2,000,000 photos, give or take.  That's right, even though the MC101 Series are supposed to link to TVs or networks, via TV tuner or another of the many ports on the side (USB, HDMI, LAN etc.), they use a PC OS. Fortunately, this makes them plug-and-play ready, so it's actually a good thing. All in all, we suppose that the M101 Series qualify as PCs in media player garb. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Besides, you can take it to a LAN party easily too.

Customers can order full and barebone (no storage or memory) configurations beginning today, but shipments won't commence before June. The starting price is $399, or 310 Euro if exchange rates are to be believed.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview