AMD CPU & Chipset Roadmap - November 2000

AMD’s Athlon hits the road

With all of this focus on decreasing power consumption and die shrinks over the next year, it looks like we will finally see notebooks from AMD based on something other than the K6-X line of processors. 

Intel’s mobile Celeron and Pentium III processors have been trampling all over AMD’s K6-X line of mobile CPUs.  You definitely don’t see the level of acceptance of AMD’s mobile CPUs as you do of their desktop CPUs.

Luckily, along the same time as the Palomino’s release, a mobile version of the Athlon based on the Palomino core will also hit the streets.  Mass production of the mobile Athlon based on the Palomino will occur sometime before the second quarter of 2001. 

The chip will remain relatively unchanged from its desktop counterpart; it will just run at lower clock speeds and will feature PowerNow! support.  Don’t expect to see any 266MHz FSB mobile Athlon parts though. 

The launch of the Thoroughbred core will also mark the launch of the mobile version of a 0.13-micron Athlon based on the same core.  Just like the mobile Palomino’s relationship to its desktop brother, the mobile Thoroughbred will simply run at lower clock speeds and have PowerNow! support.

With ATI and NVIDIA both bridging the gap between desktop and mobile 3D graphics acceleration and AMD, Intel and Transmeta working on improving battery life along with performance it won’t be long before traveling will be much more entertaining experience.