AMD’s latest processor is for notebooks. The new mobile processor is the Athlon 4 1500+ featuring QuantiSpeed and AMD PowerNow! Technology. The new part is built at the Dresden Fab 30 using AMD’s .18-micron process.
As you know, this new processor may be named the Athlon 4 1500+, but in reality it is an Athlon 4 1.33 Ghz chip. We realize that AMD is going to make it harder and harder for us to find (or remember) what the actual clock speeds are on these chips as they publish the name and not the megahertz, but we’ll keep trying to keep it straight. Not that we don’t agree wholeheartedly with AMD about the necessity of defining performance as opposed to MHz, but we’d like to keep the record as straight as we can.
A case in point: we see that Apple, in announcing their new G4s based on 1.2 Ghz PowerPC chips, just ups and says the PowerPC 1 Ghz functions as good as a 2 GHz Pentium 4. It looks to us like benchmarking is going to become very important once again as companies make difficult to substantiate claims. Press release