AMD rolls out mobile chips

AMD this week unveiled its 600Mhz and 700Mhz mobile Duron processors that match the speed of mobile Celeron chips from rival Intel.

NEC will be the first to offer the 700Mhz chip in a notebook that will be available only in Japan later this month.

The Duron is the first mobile chip based on AMD's Athlon processor technology. It is equipped with 192Kb of cache memory, including a 64Kb Level 2 cache and AMD's 200Mhz front-side bus. An AMD spokesperson said the chip is not a major redesign "but has been tweaked to get the current processor down into the mobile envelope".

The company is also working on a 900Mhz mobile Athlon chip, codenamed Palomino, which is due to be rolled out later this quarter, while the second-generation mobile Duron chip is not expected to arrive until the second quarter of this year. Intel is also expected to announce new mobile processors during the first half of this year.

Kevin Krewell, an analyst at processor industry researcher MicroDesign Resources, said the new mobile Duron will have an uphill battle to regain the market share that AMD enjoyed in retail consumer notebooks with the K6-2 in the first quarter of last year.

"I expect that other original equipment manufacturers will adopt mobile Durons and Athlons, but Intel's offerings are better now than last year and its products range from very low power [the upcoming ultra-low voltage 500Mhz Pentium III] to the fastest notebook processor [the 850Mhz Pentium III] and soon a 1Ghz mobile Pentium III [due late first quarter or early second quarter]," he said.

Separately, AMD posted its fourth-quarter results which narrowly failed to meet Wall Street's expectations, but were in line with its own lowered projections.

Sales increased 21 per cent to $1.18bn, while net profit jumped from $65.1m, or 21 cents a share, last year to $177.9m, or 53 cents a share. Analysts had predicted earnings of 55 cents a share, which were revised after AMD, along with a number of other industry players, warned of dire results in December.