AMD FINALLY CAME out with their dual core Neo CPU line. The new models are the BGA packaged Athlon Neo X2 L325 and Turion Neo X2 625.
We first showed you pictures of the HP DV2 with the Turion L625 in June, but it was only known by it’s core name, Congo, back then. Now it is a full fledged product, with a real grown up name. Expect a lot of netbooks with the L625 from the usual suspects, HP, Gateway and Acer, in short order.
The most interesting thing about the duo is the socket, it is called ASB1, you will never see a Neo in the wild one not soldered into one. Since the Athlon L325 is made for embedded platforms like this Albatron, you can only buy things with the CPU already in place, not a bare board or CPU. Upgrades are right out.
The Turion CPU sucks 18W of power, and AMD puts it down as TDP, not ACP, so things are looking up. No listing was given for the Athlon variant, but if the whispers are correct, this part is basically a dual core K8, undervolted and with a whole lot of fab tricks done to lower power. It should perform on par with a standard K8 based Athlon X2 while sucking less power.
On the chipset side, you can choose either the 780E or M690E, both defeatured but still very good variants of the desktop 780 and 690 chips. All in all, it is a great set of platforms. Where they lose to the Atom in raw wattage, the Neos more than make up for it with horsepower and chipset features.
The last bit is the most problematic, clock speed, or lack thereof. This is not to say they are slow, but for the article, we tried to find out what the actual speeds were. That seemingly necessary spec is not to be found anywhere in the press release. Neo CPUs were also not in the linked pages, and the product page we hunted down here seems to go out of it’s way to not provide any technical details. Guys, there are things about Intel you shouldn’t emulate.
That said, the original Neo is a decent part. S|A central currently has a DV2, and once you strip out the Windows blight and realize the fan will literally never throttle down, it is a decent little box. We hear the second gen is a much more polished product, so things are looking good.S|A
Update: AMD got back to us and said that the speeds are 1.6GHz and 1.5GHz for the Turion and Athlon Neo’s.
Charlie Demerjian
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