The chips feature AMD's battery-conscious PowerNow! technology, which the company claims can extend battery life by up to 30 percent. Both HP and Compaq have announced support for the processor; a new Compaq 1200-series Presario notebook based on the 1-GHz Athlon 4 was released over the weekend.

According to Tim Wright, director of desktop marketing for AMD, the desktop architecture was revamped to optimize it for power consumption issues. "We did some development work on the processor core to reduce power consumption at equivalent clock and voltage levels by 20 percent, compared to the previous generation of Athlon," Wright said.

"In addition, we've done some work in cache control logic to add hardware-specific data pre-fetch features. We also added 52 new multimedia instructions and thermal diode capabilities," Wright added.

The data pre-fetch feature predicts what data the processor needs and fetches it from the main memory, throwing that data on the cache so that access times to that data are as short as possible. The thermal diode capabilities let OEMs design logic on the motherboard to monitor the temperature of the processor.

But the most significant mobile-specific feature is the PowerNow! technology, which optimizes battery life by allowing the user to switch into different modes, based on performance needs. Much like Intel's SpeedStep technology, PowerNow! features three user-selectable modes.

"There's the battery-saver mode, for the lowest power state, but the high-performance and automatic modes are what most people will take advantage of," Wright said. "In the automatic mode, you can dynamically increase the clock frequency based on the application needs being executed by the end user," Wright said.

Running a typical application such as Microsoft Word, the processor will rest between keystrokes — along with the end user — kicking in again only when the application is taxed, extending battery life. In battery-saver mode, the processor always runs at the lowest power state; in high-performance mode, the processor always runs at maximum performance; the automatic mode delivers performance on demand.

In March, Intel was the first to release a mobile processor, its Pentium III, at the 1-GHz level. But as AMD migrates to a 0.13-micron process, shrinks its packaging and takes advantage of silcon-on-insulator technology developed in conjunction with Motorola, its mobile offerings look to keep the company firmly entrenched in its performance rivalry with Intel.

The 1-GHz, 950-MHz, 900-MHz and 850-MHz mobile AMD Athlon 4 processors are priced at $425, $350, $270 and $240, respectively, and AMD's new 850-MHz and 800-MHz mobile Duron processors are priced at $197 and $170, respectively, in 1,000 unit quantities.