Gateway's laptop can be defined as a prototypical netbook, but with better integrated graphics than typically found in Atom-based netbooks. The US$399 laptop has an 11.6-inch display, weighs about 3.14 pounds (1.4 kilograms) and measures about an inch thick. It includes AMD's ATI Radeon x1270 integrated graphics and the RS690 chipset. The laptop is designed for Internet and basic applications like word processing, Acer America said in a statement.

AMD perhaps didn't intend for the low-power chip to be in Gateway's netbook, but it made its way there nevertheless, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. Unlike Intel, which has specially designed Atom for netbooks, AMD does not want to design chips for netbooks.

If AMD had a choice, it would rather put the chip in more expensive laptops to extract better margins, McCarron said. The low margins of $400 laptops don't help AMD financially, so the company may try hard to limit the chip's usage in other netbooks, he said.

But the chip could be used in PCs or servers where power efficiency is a concern. For example, Intel's Atom is now being used in servers, so AMD's netbook chips could end up there as well, McCarron said.