AMD Launches Congo Ultrathin Mobile Platform

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AMD’s second generation ultrathin platform is here.

Along with the new Vision branding initiative, AMD today also launched its new ultrathin mobile platform – codenamed Congo.

AMD had already decided that it wasn’t going to partake in a war against Intel for the netbook market by creating an Atom competitor, but instead would make chips that were for similar form factors (small notebooks) but with more processing power (along with heftier power requirements).

The new Congo platform is composed of a low profile, energy-efficient Athlon Neo dual-core and integrated graphics on par with the previous generation’s discrete part.

Pat Moorhead, VP of Advanced Marketing at AMD, explains Congo in simple terms as how it relates to the company’s previous efforts: “It’s real easy to describe the 2nd generation ultrathin design: Take the 1st generation, give it a second CPU core and take nearly the performance of the first generation’s discrete card, shrink it and place it into the chipset decreasing energy consumption.”

The result is hardware fit for small form factor notebooks with some decent multimedia muscle too.

Moorhead in his blog used a MSI notebook running with Congo as an example. It featured an Athlon Neo X2 Dual Core Processor L335 at 1.6 GHz and a Radeon HD 3200 GPU.

The demo machine was able to play YouTube HD and Hulu HD videos, as well as Blu-ray movies (through the use of an external drive) at 1080p without problems. The platform also has HDMI out, allowing it to output that 1080p stream.

Mainstream games such as the Sims and Spore also ran decently, but getting more intense games such as Left 4 Dead required settings to be dialled way down.

Stay tuned for more after we get our chance to go hands-on.

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