3DNow! Professional is the third version of the AMD technology, which was introduced with the fledgling K6-2 processor. At that point in time, 3DNow! was in direct competition to Intel's MMX and shared little in common. With the Athlon came Enhanced 3DNow! which added the basic MMX instruction set. The 3DNow! Professional technology featured on the Palomino and Morgan cores goes one step further and adds 52 new instructions, thereby making the processor fully SSE compatible.

This gives the AMD Mobile Athlon 4 and Duron processors the potential of enhanced multimedia performance over previous core designs. This could be as basic as faster Quake 3 performance (an area Intel continues to excel at) or processing digital audio/video at a much higher rate.

The AMD PowerNow! technology provides features necessary for the portable computing market, and allows a few types of operating conditions that can extend the battery life of a notebook. This amounts to a processor with built-in PowerNow! functionality and a software application that allows user manipulation of the processor speeds and voltages.

AMD PowerNow! has three distinct modes of operation: automatic, high-performance and battery saver. Automatic mode dynamically allocates CPU resources, speeds and voltages based on the current application requirements. Load up a CPU intensive program and the processor will shift to a higher core speed and vice versa. The other two modes are simply the minimum and maximum levels of the automatic setting. Battery saver mode always runs the processor at it lowest speed, while high-performance does the opposite and jacks the core speed to its highest level.

Due to the above performance and power-saving enhancements, there have been some changes to the physical Athlon core as well. The Mobile AMD Athlon 4 processor's die size has grown to 128mm˛ and integrates 37.5M transistors vs. the 120mm˛ size and 37 million transistors of current Athlon processors. There is no firm data on the Mobile Duron yet, but we can expect it to also be a bit larger than the current 100mm˛ die size and 25 million transistors.

You will notice that the Mobile Athlon 4 now has a lower voltage than the Mobile Duron, which is a reversal of the current scenario. It is actually quite logical when you think about it, though, since the speed differential between the two lines favors the Athlon. The fastest Mobile Athlon 4 is 333 MHz slower than the high-end Athlon 1.33 GHz, while the Mobile Duron 850 is only 50 MHz removed from the highest-end desktop Duron. This is a prime reason why the core voltage only decreases by a miniscule 0.1V in the Mobile Duron.

Another important core enhancement is the addition of an on-die temperature sensor, the absence of which on the current AMD processors was a major complaint of both system vendors and users alike. In all likelihood this should allow for some form of auto-shutdown functionality, or a method of saving the processor in case a heatsink is misaligned or a fan burns out.