Today AMD released a Press Release announcing the release of its mobile Athlon XP, replacing the old Athlon 4’s.

Manufactured at 0.13 microns and clocked at speeds ranging from 1400+ to 1700+ it is aimed to match Intels’ latest P4-M which is clocked at 1.7Ghz. Availability for the 1400 and 1500 is immediate whilst the 1600 and 1700 parts will be available later this quarter. Expect to see notebooks shipping with these processors being introduced in early May, AMD citing the first to be from Sharp.

As expected, like their move from the Athlon-C to Athlon XP (desktop – maybe the new Athlon XP Mobile will be dubbed the XPM?) the new mobile Athlon XP is pin compatible with existing Socket-A packaging. There is an interesting option of an even lower powered micro Pin Grid Array package, but I don’t see how that would be useful unless AMD cuts power consumption to take on the low-voltage CPU’s Intel has flooded the market with..

The new mobile Athlon XP includes features like PowerNow! and QuantiSpeed architecture and now operates at 266 MHz FSB (up from 200 MHz FSB on Athlon 4). It does however have a larger L2 cache or SSE2.

The obligatory pricing details for the 1400+, 1500+, 1600+ and 1700+ are US$190, $250, $380 and $489 respectively.

Whilst all this is good, cramming more power from the CPU and with NVidia’s recent release of the GeForce 4 Go meaning that games can now played on laptops there is there is still the bottleneck of slow hard disk drives (5400rpm) keeping the speed of laptops below their full potential.