AMD Athlon Neo

AMD Athlon Neo Not to be outdone by Intel’s Menlow/Poulsbo/Atom platform, or NVIDIA’s Ion platform, AMD/ATI are throwing their hat in the ring.

Unfortunately we won’t see the results until sometime in March, but AMD is working on a new platform, the 65nm AMD Athlon Neo, which is built for ultraportable devices (but don’t confuse it with the 45nm Conesus CPU from AMD, that’s much later this year). To be fair to NVIDIA and Intel, AMD is aiming slightly higher – as Engadget points out, they have no desire to “race to the bottom” (the cheapest of the cheapest netbooks).

While it might not make it into the low-end netbook market, it could make it into the higher-end markets.

Highlights:
* More powerful than Intel Atom
* ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410
* “Smooth” 1080p playback with HD media
* Overall faster in the handling of media (encoding, etc.).

The graphics chipset is definitely much more powerful than what we currently have available. Even if it doesn’t make its way into netbooks, it’s still poised to shake things up in the 11″ – 12″ market.

Read: Engadget