The Engine And The Gear
The Averatec AV3220H1's engine comprises a Mobile Athlon XP-M (LV) 2000+ with a maximum real clock frequency of 1.525MHz. The CPU is based on the Barton core, which offers a 512 kB full-speed L2-cache and a front side bus clock speed of 133MHz. Touted as a low-voltage model, the CPU only requires an operational voltage of 1.25 Volts. Due to the relatively low supply voltage, the maximum power loss of this CPU is 25 Watts. As a result, it is very well-suited to meet ultra-portable mobile demands.
The mobile AthlonXP-M 2000+ (LV) is based on the Barton Core
Being a mobile CPU, the LV-Athlon XP-M 2000+ includes AMD's power saving technology Powernow . When employing this technology, the CPU performance and power consumption automatically change depending on the processor's workload. If the system requires increased processor performance, the processor clock rate is higher. If the processor load is lower, the CPU operates at decreased clock rates.
Barton's two faces: On the left, the Athlon-XP for the desktop PC. On the right, the mobile version in form of the Athlon XP-M-2000+.
As a chipset, the KN400A comes along with the VIA-made Southbridge VT8235. This is a chipset designed for mobile use, and it includes an integrated graphics core. The graphics core, in turn, is based on the Unichrome by S3-Graphics. With just one pixel pipeline, two texture units and an integrated MPEG2 decoder, this graphics sub-system is not suited for sophisticated 3D games. But for playing DVD videos and running typical office applications, it works perfectly fine. As is the case in all shared-memory systems (also known as Unified-Memory-Architecture Systems or UMA), the graphics system uses part of the RAM as video memory. How much it uses depends on the corresponding value that the user enters in the BIOS. There, users will find a switch for adjusting the size of the video memory to 8, 16, 32, or 64 MB. RAM will decrease accordingly, that is, depending on how large the video memory is. Consequently, the 256 MB for the basic features of the Averatec AV3220H1 are somewhat tight. After all, operating the typical office applications, Internet Explorer and a mail program simultaneously consumes 200 MB of memory.
