AMD's Unveils Ultrathin 'Nile' Platform, Madness Ensues

AMD's Ultrathin 'Nile' platform keeps crippled floating point units.

AMD's Ultrathin "Nile" Platform will use AMD's 880G chipset with Radeon HD 4200 class graphics and TDPs below 15W. All CPUs support AMD-V hardware virtualization instructions.

Turion II Neo - HT @ 3.2MT/s, 2MiB L2 cache, 15W TDP

• K665 - 1.7GHz, dual core
• K625 - 1.5GHz, dual core

Athlon II Neo - HT @ 2MT/s, TDP 12W, 64 bit FPU

• K325 - 1.3GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, dual core
• K125 - 1.7GHz, 1MiB L2 cache

AMD V Series - HT @ 2MT/s, TDP 9W, 64bit FPU

• V105 - 1.2GHz, 512KiB L2 cache

Market differentiation is plenty and seems to be here to stay for a long time.

As I recommended before, don't get anything with a 64bit FPU or go for Intel.
The K625 is $50 more when compared to the K325 and Intel's CPUs have been un-crippled as of late, with only the desktop Atom suffering from disabled features in VT-x and SpeedStep.

Looking at Intel in more detail:

• Intel's Arrandale based Celeron processors - currently both featuring hardware virtualization support and SpeedStep; something that was missing in Penryn based cores.
• Pentium processors - unfortunately lacking VT-x support, so if you'll use virtual machines you better do away with the extra 1MiB L2 cache and keep VT-x with the Celeron.

Intel's current budget options are then:

• Intel Celeron P4500 (2M Cache, 1.86 GHz) - 35W
• Intel Celeron P4505 (2M Cache, 1.86 GHz) - 35W, supports PCIe 2x8 and 1x16
• Intel Celeron U3400 (2M Cache, 1.06 GHz) - 18W, includes iGPU

The U3400 will have better performance due to the more efficient architecture - at least compared to the K325 - and will blow past it in floating point workloads. Graphics performance won't be as good but slightly so.