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AMD Takes Athlon Mobile

Chip battle hits the road with the March release of first mobile Athlon notebooks.

Ashlee Vance, IDG News Service

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Fans of Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon processor can soon take the Intel Pentium's main rival on the road.

AMD prepares to challenge Intel in the mobile processor market with the late March release of the first notebooks powered by a mobile version of its Athlon processor. While AMD has gained ground against Intel on the desktop, the chipmaker continues to lack a high-end product for the consumer and business notebook markets. Sources close to Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, however, confirm that they both plan to release notebooks with AMD's mobile Athlon chip in the March time frame. The release of notebooks running the mobile Athlon brings a second performance chip option to notebook consumers currently limited to Intel Pentium chips. But expect Intel to add some mobile speed updates of its own.

AMD remains tight-lipped on the exact release date of the mobile Athlon and on the speeds of the new chip. The company will only commit to a late first-quarter release date at this time, says an AMD spokesperson.

Fast and Portable Athlons

A source close to Hewlett-Packard shed more light on the situation, saying HP plans to use the mobile Athlon in both its consumer Pavilion notebooks and its OmniBook business notebooks. The high-end machines will use a 900-MHz mobile Athlon chip, the HP source says.

Likewise, a Compaq source admits strong interest in the mobile Athlon, saying that some notebooks with at least a 900-MHz processor will arrive by March.

"The key to penetration in the corporate space is getting one or more of the large tier-one vendors to use the products," says Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "The mobile Athlon would be an important piece to having a complete top-to-bottom line for AMD."

AMD has suffered from a lack of presence in the notebook sector, only offering its low-end K6 line of chips. The new mobile Athlon might be AMD's first true attack against Intel in notebook markets, McCarron says.

A Desktop Contender

"Certainly, we have seen that AMD has been a strong competitor to Intel in the desktop market and presumably that would happen in the notebook space as well," he says.

This month, analysts at Microprocessor Report awarded the best PC processor prize to AMD's Athlon even over Intel's latest desktop weapon, the Pentium 4.

And in the mobile market, Intel does not plan to be left behind. The chip behemoth plans to unveil a 900-MHz and a 1-GHz mobile Pentium III chip by mid-2001, according to an Intel spokesperson.

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