AMD Ships Mobile Athlon 4, Duron; Compaq First To Adopt Claims Highest Performance in Notebook Arena

On Saturday, May 12, the TV pitchpeople were first to offer Compaq Presario 1200 series laptop computers featuring AMD’s new Athlon 4 processor. The Athlon 4 joins AMD’s equally new mobile Duron CPU in a double-barreled assault on the notebook PC market, currently dominated by Intel Corp. (with some skirmishing by Transmeta’s Crusoe chip). Both the mobile Duron and Athlon 4 feature AMD’s PowerNow technology, which AMD says “blasts past the competition’s battery power management implementation” by delivering up to 30 percent longer battery life and up to 50 percent more performance than Intel’s SpeedStep scheme. A Windows control panel lets users switch among three operating modes: In “high performance” mode, the CPU always run at maximum performance; in “battery saver” mode, the CPU always runs in its lowest power state; and in “automatic” mode, the system determines the appropriate level of power and performance based on application demand. The mobile Athlon 4 features 384K of on-chip, full-speed cache (128K Level 1 and 256K Level 2 cache) with hardware data prefetch, a superscalar floating-point unit, and support for AMD’s 3DNow Professional instructions and 200MHz AMD Athlon front-side bus. It’s available in 850MHz ($240), 900MHz ($270), 950MHz ($350), and 1GHz ($425) speeds (all prices in 1,000-unit OEM quantities). Aimed at value-conscious business and home laptop buyers, AMD’s mobile Duron processor features 192K of total on-chip cache and data prefetch, along with 3D Now Professional and 200MHz front-side bus support. It’s offered in 800MHz ($170) and 850MHz ($197) flavors. Like the Athlon 4, the mobile Duron is compatible with AMD's venerable Socket A infrastructure. While Compaq, which will offer 1GHz Athlon 4 Presario 1200 notebooks immediately through its Web site and retail kiosks, is the first PC vendor to sign up, AMD’s press release for the new CPUs also contains a thumbs-up quote from a Hewlett-Packard mobile computing marketing director, so it seems likely that at least two big names are ready to put an Athlon in your lap.