Newest Athlon Hits 1.73 GHz

Advanced Micro Devices is announcing Wednesday three new microprocessors designed to boost performance in mobile, desktop, workstation, and server systems.

The new chips include AMD's Athlon XP 2100+ for desktop PCs, Mobile Athlon 4 1600+ for notebooks, and Athlon MP 2000+ for servers and workstations.

The desktop XP 2100+ reaches speeds of 1.73 GHz and costs $420 per chip, according to AMD officials. The Mobile Athlon 4 1600+, priced at $380, hits 1.4-GHz speeds, and the MP 2000+, which can power systems alone or in pairs, climbs to 1.67 GHz and costs $415. All prices are based on purchases of 1000 units, typical of PC vendors.

Hardware manufacturers are keeping pace with AMD by releasing systems based on these new chips almost simultaneously. New desktop PCs powered by the XP 2100+ chip are available now from Compaq, Fujitsu Siemens, and NEC. Racksaver and Boxx Technologies are currently delivering systems with the Athlon MP 2000+, and Compaq is taking orders for notebooks with the Athlon 4 1600+. The new Compaq notebooks will be available in retail outlets shortly, according to officials.

The chips and new systems are making their debut at the CeBIT trade show occurring this week in Hanover, Germany.

Chip Wars Accelerate

This vendor support, while not unusual for AMD, shows some early acceptance for the new processors.

"It's showing that they continue to come out with new products and are doing announcements with [vendors] that are using the chip as well; they're not just throwing the part out there," said Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research.

AMD's new chips will compete with rival Intel's Pentium 4 desktop processor and Pentium III-M and Celeron processors. On Tuesday, Intel announced a new version of its multiprocessor Xeon chip for workstations and servers that reaches speeds of 1.6 GHz.

The nomenclature that AMD now uses for its chips, an initiative it began last fall, is designed to give customers a more accurate sense of performance than simply stating the megahertz, said John Rowe, product marketing engineer with AMD's mobile group. The numbers, such as 2100, represent relative performance, instead of the internal clock speed of the chip.

"It's a good way to communicate to the customer what performance they can expect out of the processor they're buying," Rowe said, adding that after a little skepticism in the beginning, the branding seems to be catching on with vendors and customers.