During CES, AMD will showcase its Athlon Neo processor (the Yukon platform) designed to power a reasonably muscular ultraportable whose pricing starts at around $700 (just a hair above what some companies charge for their high-end netbooks) and tops out at $1400. Think of it as a step up from Intel's Atom and a possible competitor to nVidia's Ion platform concept - an nVidia GeForce 9400M GPU married to an Intel Atom CPU on a tiny motherboard. In AMD's case, that baseline configuration has a 1.6-GHz CPU working with ATI Radeon X1250 graphics on the motherboard. Though it's faster than Intel's integrated option, the Neo doesn't exactly light the world on fire. Partner a Neo with an ATI Mobility HD3410, as AMD is proposing, and the combination can handle 1080p high-def playback and reasonable game performance.
AMD is playing a high-stakes game, but this is a smart move at the right time. And what I've seen so far on paper looks good. Whereas nVidia is just showing off its prototype net-top boxes, AMD has a real product that will launch soon.
AMD's poster child packing Neo under the hood is HP's Pavilion Dv2. The Dv2 packs some fancy features into a 11.50-by-9.45-by-0.93-inch, 3.8-pound magnesium alloy frame. The most obvious of these is the new 1.6-GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU. Besides that, the Dv2 hosts a full suite of external notebook ports (three USB 2.0 ports,VGA, RJ-45/ethernet, headphone/line out, microphone in, 5-in-1 Digital Media Reader), Wi-Fi connectivity, and optional Gobi WWAN integration. I'm especially curious to see how well the ATI Mobility Radeon HD3410 GPU will look on the machine's 12.1-inch diagonal WXGA (1280 by 800) LED.
Will it be able to handle modern games? That's the million-dollar question. As usual, nVidia was quick to demonstrate that its 9400M GPU can run Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare at 1024 by 768 pixels with a solid frame rate of 25to 30 frames per second. Once I get a little up-close-and-personal time with the Pavilion Dv2, I'll let you know how it fares.
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