HP has quietly began selling its new 11.6-inch notebook, the Pavilion dm1z. It sports AMD's new Athlon II Neo and Turion II Neo processors, ranging from single-core 1.7GHz for the Athlon part and moving to 1.3GHz dual-core Turion parts. Otherwise, 2GB of RAM is standard, though it can be upgraded to 3GB or 5GB. It can also be equipped with a hard drive as large as 500GB or a 128GB solid state drive.
Acer's 11.6-inch Aspire 1551 netbook with AMD's dual-core, 1.5GHz Turion II Neo and 1.3GHz Athlon II Neo CPU is now available for sale in North America through Amazon. The former has 3GB of RAM, while the latter gets 4GB and that new AMD netbook chip. Shared features include the 1366x768 display and ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4225 with 384MB of dedicated RAM. The Turion II Neo system gets a 250GB hard drive, with a 320GB drive optional, while the Athlon II Neo model gets the larger drive as standard fare.
Toshiba's notebook launches were bolstered today by two rare AMD-based ultraportables. The 11.6-inch Satellite T215 and 13.3-inch Satellite T235 both use Athlon II Neo chips to provide a one-inch, under four pounds design that still has integrated graphics capable of HD video and modern 3D. The T235 adds an option for faster Turion II Neo hardware or Intel's CULV-based Pentium dual-core.
After brief teases from HP and others, AMD today confirmed full details of its 2010 notebook chips. The mainstream processors are now known to be much more power efficient than both previous AMD chips and Intel's quad-core hardware. The four-core 2GHz Phenom II N930 and the 1.6GHz P920 use just 35W and 25W of power, rendering either of them miserly enough to sit in thin-and-light notebooks.
