News Bits: AMD Market Share, Intel Dual Cores, Longhorn Beta, Celeron M, ATI X700

AMD Looks to Capture 12-15% of the Notebook CPU Market for 2005

Intel has been stealing the spotlight lately with its latestupdate to theCentrino platform. But rest assured, AMD is waiting in the shadows...watching, working and scheming to slice a chunk of the mobile processor market from Intel. AMD currently has 5-8% of the notebook processor market, but by year end of 2005 they want to own 12-15% of that market.

AMD plans to do this via its 64-bit enabled Turion 64 Mobile processor, which will be released in April. On April 18 HP, Acer and Asustek will release notebooks with this new AMD processor and will also wage a promotional worldwide campaign for the processor.

The new notebooks to be unveiled by Acer and HP in April will use the AMD Turion 64 2800+ and 3000+ CPUs that have power consumption levels between 25W and 35W. The AMD chips will be priced about 15% cheaper than Intel Pentium MDothanprocessors.

Rumor has it that HP might try and raise its total overall sales of AMD notebooks from 20-30% of its notebooks up to 50% for 2005. A boost from HP, the number two notebook manufacturer in the world, would certainly help AMD.

More: http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20050205A2003.html

Counterpoint: Intel Looks to Bury AMD With Yonah Pentium M Dual Core Processor

Well, having said all that about AMD wanting to capture 15% of the notebook market, I'd be remissed not to mention that Intel has other plans. Intel certainly enjoys being dominant in the mobile processor market -- and yes they are dominant to the point that Japan recently has charged them of being a monopoly -- but nonetheless Intel has baking in the oven its processors codenamed Yonah that it hopes will run circles around anything AMD can bring to the table. Intel will in fact release a 2.5GHz processor with a 667MHz Front Side Busand dual coresdubbed the X50. The Inquirer has great coverage and insight on Yonah in this article: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21091

In other Intel news. The companyhas not been secretive about its dual-core processor ambitions and we of course knew that sometime this year Intel would release a dual core desktop chip, but it took until yesterday for Intel to formally announce that such processorswere in productionand that they would be available in 2nd Quarter of 2005. No doubt the Intel marketing engine will now get fired into action for marketing these dual core chips. Processor cores are responsible for doing math calculations, which is of course the main function of a processor, so theoretically one core is nice but two cores are twice as nice. We expect to seethe Pentium M Yonah dual core chip sometime at the beginning of 2006.

More: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1761380,00.asp

Microsoft Longhorn Beta to Arrive For June '05

For those keeping track of the next Microsoft Windows OS, codenamed Windows Longhorn, Microsoft has played the card of under promise and over deliver by saying they would release the Beta 1 version of Longhorn by year end 2005, but yesterday they instead announced that June 2005 the public will be able to download and beat up the next generation OS.

More: http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Longhorn+beta+will+arrive+by+June/2100-1012_3-5566423.html?tag=nefd.top

Intel Celeron M, Good Performance foryour Moneyor Pitfall?

A lot of buyers will shun purchasing a laptop or Tablet PC with an Intel Celeron M processor, even if it cuts the price by $200, but are you really losing a lot by going with a Celeron M? It's a good question that Barry Doyle of TabletPCReviewSpot.com investigates in a recent article:

More: http://www.tabletpcreviewspot.com/default.asp?newsID=178

ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Graphics Processor Review

With the release of new notebooks lately, due to the new Intel Pentium M Sonoma offering, you'll be seeing a lot of new ATI graphics cards showing up in notebooks you buy too. The ATI X300 and X600 are pretty popular graphics processors that offer mid-range performance. The X800 is the high-end performing notebook GPU from ATI, but there also exists now the X700 which is a mid to high-end offering. It won't be as fast as the X800, but it'll also be nicer to the battery and not generate as much heat, so it could be a great choice. HotHardware.com has a very nice review of the ATI Mobility Radeon X700: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=637&cid=10