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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AK2004 who wrote (39545)	5/14/2001 10:28:54 AM
From: bacchus_ii	Respond to of 275872

Forbes: AMD Rejoins Notebook Race Monday May 14, 10:00 am Eastern Time Forbes.com AMD Rejoins Notebook Race By Arik Hesseldahl The notebook computer space is about to get a lot more interesting now that Advanced Micro Devices is rejoining the race for the highest-performing chips in that space. Having won the race to be the first to push a speedy 1-gigahertz processor into a desktop machine last year, AMD stumbled in the follow-up race with Intel to be the first to put a chip that fast into a notebook computer. When Intel debuted a 1-GHz version of its mobile Pentium III in March, it had the field to itself, and the high price for the chip--and the notebooks containing them--reflected that. Now the competition between them begins anew. While a little late to the game, AMD has still shown up with a formidable chip in its Athlon 4, which is launching at speeds of 850 megahertz to 1 GHz, which will appear first in notebook PCs available from Compaq right away. More PC manufacturers are expected to follow suit by the end of the quarter. Perhaps the reason AMD took longer than expected to finish work on Athlon 4 is the new features that have been pumped into it. Its memory cache is 384 kilobytes, which is the same as on the desktop version of the Athlon chip. But now there's a new "pre-fetch" capability that tries to speed up the process of seeking and retrieving needed data by looking ahead to stay a few steps ahead of the process. It also has a new version of the 3DNow technology that makes multimedia applications like games, video and sound possible. Called 3DNow Professional, it boasts 52 new instruction sets, which in layman's terms means this chip knows a few new tricks about graphics and sound that previous versions didn't. And since power management and battery life have become so important for notebook chips in the last year or so, the Athlon 4 also has the Power Now technology that can adjust the performance of the chip on fly when you're using the notebook on internal battery power. AMD says the power savings will let you watch a whole DVD movie on one battery charge, or work longer on the plane when traveling on business. Finally, the best feature on AMD's chips may turn out to be the price the company is offering the chips to PC manufacturers: $425. That's lower than the $722 Intel had been charging on its fastest notebook chip as of May 1. Now that there's a price war between them, and now that Intel has renewed competition for the high end of the notebook space, look for prices to start coming down all over the place.