AMD announce Mobile Athlon 4

Advanced Micro Devices have officially released their mobile Athlon and Duron parts, a press release told us this morning. The characteristically long and boring release featured a handful of interesting points about the CPUs, so we'll focus on those. Compaq are the first to offer notebooks based on the new AMD Athlon 4 processor in its Presario 1200 series. We'd really like to find out about battery life on these machines (in unbiased testing, of course) because technically it's the first time we've seen PowerNow! applied for Athlon (Palomino in other words). HP are also planning to introduce new notebooks based on the processors. The most interesting news is the pricing. Although fairly irrelevant (since we don't buy individual laptop CPUs...) it does give you some idea of the rest of the machine. The 1GHz, 950MHz, 900MHz and 850MHz mobile AMD Athlon 4 processors are priced at $425, $350, $270 and $240, respectively, and the 850MHz and 800MHz new mobile AMD Duron processors are priced at $197 and $170, respectively, each in 1,000-unit quantities. Athlon 4, the processor, features a new lower power design for notebook computing, 384 KB of on-chip, full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch (256KB of on-chip level (L2) cache and 128 Kbytes of on-chip level (L1) cache), a superscalar floating-point unit, support for AMD's 3DNow! Professional instructions for enhanced multimedia capabilities, and AMD PowerNow! technology for extended battery life. We pretty much knew most of this, but it still gives us a tingling feeling when we realise that it's finally hit notebook systems. After all, coupled with a NVIDIA GeForce Go! chip, these things could actually yield a decent gaming platform. [Pet-hate alert: these flamin' exclamation marks all over the place. I mean! What's! the! point! We get the picture either way! - Ed] Expect Athlon 4 to hit desktop systems very soon now. Related Feature - AMD Athlon using DDR SDRAM

Source - press release