AMD enters India's low-cost PC market

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced Thursday a PC priced at about $230 for the Indian market. The PC is part of the "50x15" program of AMD in Sunnyvale, California, which aims to provide 50 percent of the world's population with affordable Internet access and computing capabilities by the year 2015, the company said.

The new Linux-based PC was launched Thursday in Delhi by Dayanidhi Maran, the country's minister for information technology and communications. The Indian government has said that the proliferation of PCs and the Internet in the country is one of its top priorities.

The new PC features AMD's x86 1600 MHz processor with 128MB of RAM and a 40GB hard disk, and comes with a 15-inch digital color monitor, 52x optical drive, keyboard, scroll mouse and the Linux OS, according to a statement Thursday by AMD.

The computer is also available at about $30 more with Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition, a low-cost version of the Windows OS offered in some emerging economies. HCL Infosystems, a large PC vendor in Noida near Delhi, will offer the product.

The new PC from AMD breaks the 10,000 Indian rupees ($223) price barrier that vendors say is important to attract the mass market in India. Earlier this year HCL launched a Linux PC running a 1GHz processor from Via Technologies in Taipei at the $230 price point.