The notebook market has experienced explosive growth over the last 18 months. Thanks to the crowded arrival of the Netbook and a new focus on mobile lifestyles, this once-boring segment has become a lifeline in a time of devastating economic loss. While Intel plans to charge ahead with a new generation of the Atom, AMD has shunned the Netbook and created an entirely new class of sub-notebooks. As AMD looks to bolster the presence of their new form factor, we take a look at how they plan to get there.

Incubating a new market

After the firm hard-lined against Netbooks in November of last year, big green previewed its take on the thin’n'light at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Their vision was a new class of notebooks — dubbed value Ultra Thins — that would satisfy user performance expectations at a price point slightly above the Netbook.

“Given the way Netbooks are configured today, consumers who want a notebook at those kind of (low) price points have to compromise and as a result don’t enjoy a full PC experience, particularly around the graphics and media capability of the machine,” Meyer said circa CES. “And likewise people who wanted a thin and light machine had to pay a lot of money, typically well over a thousand dollars.”

It seems easy to dismiss the so-called value Ultra Thin as little more than obligatory rebellion against the Intel-dominated Netbook market, but the market research falls in AMD’s favor. A cursory glance at sub-notebooks reveals a gap in the market that went unserved by last winter’s products.

AMD illustrates a large price gap in portable form factors

Enter the Yukon platform

As part and parcel of their strategy to tap that unserved market, AMD also unveiled the Yukon platform during CES. Launched to retail in March, Yukon combines an AMD M690G chipset, Athlon Neo CPU and a manufacturer’s choice between the Radeon X1250 IGP and the Radeon X3410 discrete GPU.

The choice between comparatively robust GPUs is the real magic behind AMD’s Ultra Thins. While Netbooks limp along under Intel GMA architecture, even the lowly X1250 offers vastly improved performance. The proof is in the products: The Yukon-armed HP Pavilion dv2 is capable with light gaming and 1080p decoding– both tasks beyond reach of any Netbook.

But all this power doesn’t come without a cost, and the Yukon’s real-world battery life comes in behind many Netbooks at 2-3 hours.

The Athlon Neo

A capable GPU isn’t all the magic under Yukon’s hood. The final piece of the puzzle, the Athlon Neo processor, is a capable workhorse in its own right.

Speculatively, the Athlon Neo appears to be a close cousin of the Sempron 200U and 210U processors. Both the Neo and the 200s employ a 27×27mm surface-mounted BGA package, a 2.5mm vertical profile, a 65nm fabrication process, the M690 chipset, and similar thermal envelopes. If that’s not enough, the Sempron 200 chips are billed as a solution specifically designed for Ultra Thin products.

Fruit born of the same tree?

Could the Neo be a retooled Sempron in disguise? The world may never know, but the fact remains that it offers much the Atom does not.