AMD unveils 1.3GHz mobile chip

AMD has released its fastest notebook chip in the form of the Athlon 4 1500+. The processor costs $525 (£372) in quantities of a thousand and Compaq will use it in its Presario range of laptops.

The 1500+ is the first mobile offering from the company to be identified by a model number instead of its clock speed, which is 1.3GHz. It consumes two watts of power running ordinary office applications.

AMD launched its True Performance Initiative in October 2001, through which it hopes customers will better understand PC performance.

It claims that the Initiative will help define a more accurate measure of processor performance for standard applications by stressing how many transactions per minute the chip can perform, rather than basing performance simply on clock speed.

The new chips are being built using 0.18-micron copper process technology at the company's Fab 30 plant in Dresden, Germany.

Figures released this week by Mercury Research show that AMD has gained 3.5 per cent market share for processors from its far bigger rival Intel.

But the company failed to reach its own 2001 target of 50 per cent share of the US retail laptop market. At the time Intel dropped prices to stop the the loss of market share to AMD.