AMD’s Congo is coming and it looks like it will not be the “Atom-Smasher” that many are calling it. Rather it will enter Intel competition with Intel’s thin and light segment.

AMD has maintained that netbooks will eventually fade and be assimilated by the notebook market. There are some indications of this happening as netbook makers play a game of technological leapfrog with netbooks each one offering a more powerful (and of course more expensive) version.

I have to wonder if the netbook will eventually fall to the level of the MID. And the Thin-And_Light will be the next big rush.

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AMD thinks netbooks are a bit of a fad, and is laying down a roadmap for thin-and-lights while keeping its distance from any sort of “Atom killer.” The existing Yukon platform — featured in HP’s dv2 — just got an upgrade in the form of a dual-core AMD Neo chip, but things will really start to get exciting later this year with the introduction of Congo, which will pair a dual-core Neo with much better graphics and a more modern chipset. Perks in Congo, which is based on the M780G chipset and sports ATI Radeon HD 3200 IGP graphics, include hardware decoding for HD formats, DirectX 10 gaming

An interesting rumor has sprung up over at Fudzilla. It seems that MSI might be looking to drop some AMD love under the hood of their X-Slim series.

In the smaller models you will still find Atom and Intel due to poor thermal properties of the Yukon but that does not mean you won’t be able to get your AMD fix in a thin and light from MSI.

It seems MSI is working on the X410 and X610, both Yukon based. Both should be available with AMD IGPs, as well as discrete HD 4330 graphics with 512MB of memory. However, you won’t find AMD chips in smaller models, probably due to unfavorable thermals. At this point we’re not sure about dual-core Congo CPUs either.

No release date has been set, and all we know is that AMD-based X-Slims were originally planned for launch later in the year, probably late Q3 or early Q4. As this timefaime is quite a long way off, things could change, so take this with a grain of salt.