This brings us to one of the big question marks concerning these new AMD Mobile processors: exactly how much heat do they produce? Although the AMD documentation repeats many of the performance, power-saving and lower voltage advantages, the only reference to heat generation was a small quote about how fan noise would be reduced. With over-heating notebooks becoming a very real concern, we would hope that AMD would at least give out some basic thermal data concerning their new Mobile processors, even if it may not compare well against Intel.
With the Palomino and Morgan cores being very slight revisions to the existing Athlon and Duron design, do not expect a major performance increase. The included AMD documentation has performance benefits in the 5-10% range over current desktop CPUs. In terms of notebook performance, this is irrelevant, since the new models definitely smoke AMD's current K6-2/3 flagship mobile processor. The Mobile Athlon 4 should compete with, and even exceed, comparable Pentium III performance and the Mobile Duron should lay a spanking on the best that Intel's Mobile Celeron can offer.
In terms of desktop appeal, we see the enhanced Duron core being the real winner here. By moving to the copper interconnect process, overclocking should be a very interesting option and higher overall base speeds should make the Duron even more of a value contender. The enhanced desktop Athlon is a bit more difficult to get excited about, especially since AMD already produces the >1 GHz models using copper interconnects and core speeds are extremely high already. With the new Athlon 4 desktop model, you are essentially receiving a few nice core enhancements, but nothing to knock your socks off.
The following list shows the prices (in 1K lots) of the new AMD Mobile Athlon 4 and Duron processors:
Mobile AMD AthlonTM 4 Processor:
1GHz - US$425
950MHz - US$350
900MHz - US$270
850MHz - US$240
Mobile AMD DuronTM Processor
850MHz - US$197
800MHz - US$170
(all prices in 1000-unit quantities)
Compaq is the first vendor to offer a mobile Athlon 4 solution, and you can even hit their website and buy one right now. The Athlon 900 MHz and 1 GHz processors (not listed as Athlon 4 anywhere on the Compaq website, incidentally) are options on their Presario line of notebooks, along with varying speeds of Pentium III (up to 750 MHz) and Celeron (up to 766 MHz). In terms of relative value, the Athlon 1 GHz Presario 1200 model is priced very closely to a similarly equipped Pentium III 750 Presario notebook.
While this is a big design win for AMD, the Presario 1200 is still very much a mid-range line of notebooks. Being able to transition the Mobile Athlon to the higher-end Presario 1400, 1700 and 1800 series would be a coup, as well, not to mention a means getting additional coverage for the Mobile Duron within the Presario 1200 line.