AMD is definitely a company on the rise. Their desktop Athlon offers an incredible combination of price and performance, while the Duron is unequalled as a basic, value processor. Chipset selection is also improved over previous AMD offerings, and the stable AMD 760 provides power and DDR RAM support, while the VIA KT133A is a performance leader for SDRAM systems. AMD is also chipping away at the Intel CPU market, gaining market share slowly but steadily. The AMD desktop situation looks extremely good, and with future core speed increases and die shrinks coming down the pipe, it looks only to get better.

You may have noticed that I keep referring to the desktop market, and there is a very good reason for this. AMD has virtually no presence outside of desktops and Intel holds a virtual monopoly in portable computers and small business servers. The AMD Athlon and Duron are reportedly SMP-compliant, but the lack of a multi-processor chipset is holding back any current server implementations. After the AMD 760MP chipset rears its head, this story may change for the better; but we may have to wait a bit longer for this to become reality.

In mobile computing, AMD is in an even worse market situation, given the enormous size of the notebook market and the fact that AMD's flagship mobile processors are still the K6-2 and K6-3. And this is at a time when Intel offers the Mobile Pentium III at 1 GHz for performance users and the Celeron 700 at the low-end. AMD did produce a pseudo-Mobile version of their current Duron, but this was simply a lower-voltage version of the desktop processor. Mobile vendors and users require power saving features and low heat emission, and the first iteration of the Mobile Duron was selected by only a few vendors for implementation.

This brings us to the recent announcement from AMD outlining their new Mobile Athlon 4 and Duron processors based on the enhanced Palomino and Morgan core designs. The Athlon 4 naming convention is obviously a jab at Intel, who offer a high performance Pentium 4 desktop processor but have been unwilling or unable to match it with a mobile counterpart. Currently, the Intel mobile landscape consists of the Pentium III and Celeron, though an enhanced Pentium III Tualatin will be offered this July.

Although AMD has not formally released an Athlon 2 or 3, the Athlon itself has undergone a few notable revisions. It started as a 0.25 micron core CPU with 512K of off-die L2 cache, running on a 200 MHz DDR system bus, then progressed to a .18 micron core, a 256K integrated cache and then to a 266 MHz DDR bus. Which one of these iterations AMD is quoting with their Athlon 4 is an open question, but the company would certainly not choose such a controversial name if they had no way to back it up.

The Mobile Athlon 4 will be initially offered in four speeds: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 950 MHz and 1 GHz, while the Mobile Duron brings up the rear clocked at 800 and 850 MHz. It also seems that AMD has discontinued their previous Mobile Duron CPUs, in favor of these newer, faster and more functional models.