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Sony, Fujitsu, NEC pledge support for AMD

They're not all backing Athlon 4, though

Sony, Fujitsu and NEC have joined Compaq and Hewlett-Packard (just about) to pledge their support for AMD's Mobile Athlon 4 processor.

Or are they? You might well think so from a cursory look at AMD's release announcing the three Japanese vendors' support. A closer look shows that only NEC is actually planning to release an Athlon 4-based machine.

Sony and Fujitsu intend to ship notebooks based on AMD's new Mobile Duron. Sure, the Durons used by both companies - they're using the 700MHz and 800MHz parts, respectively - are based on the same Palomino core that powers the Athlon 4. Indeed, we reckon the Duron is an Athlon 4, just with a portion of its on-die L2 cache disabled.

However, it is a little bit cheeky for AMD to spin it so it sounds like Sony and Fujitsu are "expected to feature notebook PCs based on seventh-generation mobile AMD Athlon 4 and mobile AMD Duron processors".

AMD's announcement follows one from Transmeta last week that pointed out that the Crusoe-maker now has the backing of all the major Japanese notebook vendors. Now that AMD is shipping its PowerNow! power-conservation technology in both the mainstream and low-end notebook CPU markets, it's aiming to compete with Transmeta far more directly than before. ®

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