Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » AMD ships mobile chip to rival Intel Celeron M

November 23, 2004 | Comments: (0)

AMD ships mobile chip to rival Intel Celeron M

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AMD unveiled a new mobile chip today with the slightly inelegant name of Mobile Sempron. See our news site for the full story by Tom Krazit, "AMD releases Mobile Sempron ahead of 2005 mobile push."

I spoke with one of the premier industry chip analysts, Nathan Brookwood, president of Insight 64 to get his take on why anyone should care.

His answer, in two words, was "battery life."

"Intel always leaves power management out of its Celerons for mobile use. Even though Centrino has all these wonderful features to extend battery life, if you want the cheap version you give up all that stuff," Brookwood said.

At the same time, AMD has historically kept their power management, called PowerNow in the value line.

"I suspect the battery life for these Sempron mobile processors will be better than the battery life for similar notebooks configured with an Intel Celeron M [processor]" Brookwood told me.

It was Andy Grove, former head of Intel that said only the paranoid survive. Which makes me wonder how Intel might respond to the Sempron Mobile if it starts to gain market share.

It is certainly nice to see a little competition in the chip arena.

The Sempron is targeted at the thin and light crowd that wants a value-priced notebook to do their daily tasks.

In related news ATI Technologies, the graphics chip manufacturer, also announced PCI Express-based graphics processors for thin and light notebook PCs.

Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on November 23, 2004 02:21 PM

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