Digital Home Thoughts: 10 Things To Know About AMD's New Mobile Chips

"It's no secret that AMD has fallen well behind Intel in the mobile CPU space, but the company intends to make up major ground by launching its first Phenom triple-core and quad-core processors for laptops. There will be new dual-core and single-core CPUs as well, continuing the Turion and Athlon brands, only they're followed by the number "II." Here are ten facts that you'll need to know about the new chips..."

I used to be a big fan of AMD CPUs, but over the past couple of years I've found myself scratching my head at their CPUs in the mobile space - it's like they don't quite get that power consumption is a critical component of mobile computing. Take the HP dv2 from early 2009 for example: a nice notebook by all accounts, but the dual-core AMD Neo CPU at 1.6 Ghz in it slurped down 18 watts of power.

In my Proshow benchmarking test where I render a 1080p MPEG2 video, the Neo CPU matched up, on a per core basis, with an Atom CPU. That's right, not one of Intel's Core Solo or Core Duo CPUs, but a freakin' Atom CPU. The AMD Neo CPU was using 9 watts of power per core, and the Atom CPU with it's one core was using under 5 watts.

Now to be fair, a laptop is about much more than just the CPU - and the decent GPU on the HP dv2 made for a decent overall experience - but in looking at AMD's thin and light CPU line-up for 2010, I see a 1.7 Ghz CPU with two cores using 15 watts of power. 15 watts? AMD need needs to get down into the realm of 5 watts per core if they want their CPUs to be in the realm of Intel CPUs for power consumption.

All that said, these AMD chips will be appearing in 135 different laptops this year, so clearly the big OEMs have seen some value here in these chips. But is it just about price? I don't want to save $50 on a notebook if I'm going to get 25% worse battery life...