AMD's anticipated answer to the Atom is coming soon, but there's a catch: It's not an answer to the Atom. It's more expensive, faster, sucks more power, and isn't intended for netbooks. Oops!
The processor is called the Athlon Neo, and it's based on the previously-leaked Yukon platform. Compared to AMD's current offerings, it is an evolutionary step: It's smaller, media-oriented, and bundled with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 video hardware, theoretically allowing for a reasonably un-crippled user experience. But the evolution is incremental, and this is by no mean an Atom equivalent. Nor is it intended to be.
AMD boasts that the Neo will easily drive full 1080p video, something that even nicely-screened netbooks simply don't need. That's because the Neo is intended for "ultrathin" notebooks, which the company claims will live comfortably between the low-end netbooks (remember the company's snide "race to the bottom" comment?) and high-priced ultraportables.
HP was the first company to announce a Neo not-netbook, and it does indeed sit between a mini-note and an ultraportable (More on this here). It remains to be seen if that niche, which is being aggressively promoted as an entirely new class of laptop, will amount to anything more than needless moniker for a loose collection of confused products. [AMD]