AMD's Athlon Neo processor will take on Intel's Atom

As the netbook platform takes shape this year at CES, AMD is giving a more focused picture of what the inside of that platform could look like...but not too focused, at least not for a few days yet.

What AMD had been calling its "Yukon" notebook processing platform and will now call...something else, was officially unveiled this morning with HP effectively beating AMD to the punch. Its new dv2 line of netbooks will include AMD's new Athlon Neo processor, the centerpiece of the CPU maker's new netbook platform.

Until this Thursday, when AMD makes a series of presentations at CES 2009 including a major speech from CEO Dirk Meyer, only a limited amount of information is being shared about the Neo platform. What we know so far is that it's designed for "low profile" implementation.

The typical Athlon processor for desktop form factors measures about 63 x 80 mm, with a die size on-board the package of about 120 mm². The Neo package is 27 x 27 mm, which is considerably more convenient for netbook component designers to implement. Remember, there isn't yet a mass production market for netbook motherboards similar to that for desktops.

By comparison, Intel's Atom die size is 13 x 14 mm, and has a total footprint of 182 mm.

Seven years ago, AMD led the charge to reduce die size for processors, with the Athlon brand leading the way. Back before the summer of 2006, while AMD's "true multicore" competed head-to-head against the first Pentium Ds, small die size was one of AMD's key advantages, leading directly to power conservation.

But the Neo vs. Atom battle is not just for the netbook market, but also for embedded computing as well, where Atom has already found its footing. While Intel's keynote address is scheduled for this Friday, it's likely that Chairman Craig Barrett and others will be focusing on media-related topics, including those areas where Intel is making inroads outside of the traditional PC market. That includes set-top boxes, which is a market that Intel has continued to serve with basically repackaged 95 nm Pentiums. AMD officially exited the STB chip market last August, in a deal which saw the transfer of its Xilleon product line to SoC maker Broadcom.

If Neo is as versatile in the small processing department as Atom, however, AMD could re-enter that market with a competitive platform. But for now, the Neo platform is rooted to ATI's graphics processors, which include its Radeon X1250 integrated graphics chip and its Radeon HD 3410 discrete processor for decoding high-definition video. As long as AMD markets Neo as paired with ATI, it will probably be perceived as a netbook processing platform only, competing with Atom in only one of two very lucrative markets.

9:03 pm EST January 6, 2009 - A few more details for you: Compared to AMD's Sempron processor for ultra-thin notebooks, both it and the Athlon Neo MV-40 are 15 W single-core 65 nm CPUs, capable of 64-bit. But the MV-40 is clocked slightly faster at 1.6 GHz, and doubles its L2 cache over the Sempron to 512 KB.