Athlon 4 and Duron ship in laptops

AMD announced late on Tuesday that its Athlon 4 and Duron mobile processor will be used in new laptops from Fujitsu, NEC and Sony, bolstering its plans to do battle with Intel in the mobile PC market.

Athlon 4 is AMD's first mobile chip based on the Athlon core, and recently got its name as a challenge to Intel's Pentium 4, which won't appear in mobiles for months yet.

The new notebooks are all destined for the Japanese market. NEC will use the 1GHz mobile Athlon 4 and 800MHz Duron chips in its LaVie G series. The Duron chip will also be used in the LaVie L series.

Fujitsu will offer a Japanese consumer notebook in the FMV-BIBLO series based on an 800MHz Duron processor. Duron is AMD's lower-priced version of Athlon.

Sony announced a "Vaio note" laptop, also for the Japanese market, based on a 700MHz Duron chip. The system will ship later this month. The new system complements the Vaio FX210, also based on Duron, which sells in the US.

All of the systems will ship later this month, according to AMD.

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