AMD's K6-2+ in Notebooks - Evaluating Performance with PowerNow

Final Words

It's definitely about time that we took a look at AMD's PowerNow! technology, especially since we will most likely see a variant of it in AMD's upcoming line of mobile products based on an Athlon derived core. This brings us to the issue of what to expect from the mobile industry in the coming months.

Quite possibly one of the biggest things to happen to the notebook industry will happen later this year as at least a couple graphics chip manufacturers have already been talking about producing a much higher performance 3D solution for notebooks. This could finally make 3D gaming as well as professional 3D work on notebooks much more of a reality.

On the processor front, Intel will be increasing the speed of their Speedstep capable Pentium III parts in the coming months, while the Pentium III is already at 750MHz expect it to break the 800MHz barrier soon. Intel is still determined that the power consumption of other parts of the notebook need to come down before they have to worry about CPU power consumption.

AMD is continuing to ship PowerNow! capable K6-2+ and K6-III+ processors in notebooks manufactured by a handful of the major OEMs, however just as with the desktop market, the K6-X line of processors is not going to win AMD any points in the mobile industry. While PowerNow! is an excellent technology, AMD needs the power of their Athlon in mobile form. AMD is planning on doing just that, it's simply a matter of time.

With the recent rumors of a very close partnership between Transmeta and AMD in sharing mobile technology it should be quite interesting to see what sort of a face the mobile market takes over the course of the next year now that there will be some real competition in that market. One thing is for sure, we won't see a repeat of the desktop clock speed wars we've seen over the past year, in the mobile industry heat and power consumption play a much bigger role.