AMD's low-energy offering with their Geode CPUs is now years in the market. It is time to change strategy and to introduce new CPUs. The first AMD sent us is the AMD Athlon 2000+ which is only clocked with 1GHz, so we don't believe it's any competition to Atom at all. Rated with a TDP of 8W it should be close to Atom, considering power-consumption only. But for POS-systems and normal office/Internet usage it suffices.

The more interesting CPU is the Dual-Core Athlon X2 3400e. There is no official TDP, because this CPU is not ready for the market yet. We suspect it is 22W, which is the same as the 3250e, but this CPU clocks only with 1.50GHz, while the 3400e does 1.80GHz. In other aspects the low-energy Athlons and Athlons X2 are identical to their desktop counterparts, but use much less energy.

Testbed:

J&W MINIX (provided by J&W)

AMD 780G/SB700

CPUs:

AMD Athlon 64 2000+ 1.00GHz (provided by AMD)

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3400+ 1.80GHz (provided by AMD)

Memory:
OCZ SO-Dimm Kit 2GB PC2-6400 CL5 (provided by OCZ)

Graphics Card:
Onboard

Jetway Radeon HD3870 (provided by mec-electronics)

Power supply:
ITX 80W external/internal power supply

Seasonic S12II 330W power supply

Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB (provided by Seagate)

DVD-Drive:

Optiarc AD-7543A