Specifically for notebook operation Palomino (or 'Athlon 4' if you prefer) was equipped with AMD's derivate of Intel's 'SpeedStep-Technology' to safe battery power. The idea is pretty simple. Once the notebook operates with battery power the CPU is throttled down, thus providing less performance, but also requiring less power to prolong the battery life.
AMD is proud to state that PowerNow! is more advanced than Intel's SpeedStep. While Speedstep is only able to provide two different operation stages, one at full speed and one at reduced processor clock, PowerNow! comes with a third stage that automatically detects the performance required by your software and that then adjusts the processor clock speed to find the best compromise between performance and battery life. To realize this automatic mode, Athlon 4 is able to switch in between 32 different voltage/core clock stages, where the highest setting is the normal processor clock and the lowest setting is less than 500 MHz at 1.2 V.
The usual voltage of Mobile Athlon 4 is 1.4 V. At this voltage the different Mobile Athlon 4 versions have the following power requirements:
