Mobile Durons Hit the Deck

If your vision of LAN parties in the future is 100 gamers traipsing in, each with a laptop slung under their arm, then you may not be too far off. NVIDIA's decision to enter the mobile arena with the GeForce Go graphics chipset may well be one of the defining moments. Up until now, laptops have had a hard time of it with gaming. They can handle things reasonably well, but in order to even verge on decent levels of performance, slider bars have had to be moved almost completely to the left and options unticked. The GeForce Go though, will meet with some very hefty processors, like 850MHz mobile Pentium IIIs, so just what is the point? The solution to all this may well be to couple it with a cheap mobile processor, and as of today, just such a thing will hit the market, the mobile Duron. AMD have today announced that they can ship 600MHz Duron parts in bulk to any notebook manufacturer. NEC has subsequently announced a new "LaVie U" series of notebooks, using a 700MHz Duron CPU, designed for consumers who need portability and price assurance, apparently. Available in Japan on the 25th of this month, the notebooks will also include a 13"/14" TFT display, 20Gb of storage and depending on the model, a CD-R/RW or DVD-Rom drive. The latter will include a connector allowing you to hook it up to a television. So when will we get a Duron / GeForce Go powered notebook? Sometime this year, if all goes well. We anticipate the notebook market doing rather well this year...