One of the first portable computers sporting an AMD “Mullins” chip has hit the shops.  The maker of expensive printer ink HP has released its HP Pavilion 10z is a small “laptop” with a touchscreen display and an AMD E1 Micro-6200T processor. We say laptop but it seems more like a netbook with a slightly better display to us. It’s available from HP for $250.

Mullins chips are low-power, dual-core processors for low-cost tablets, notebooks, and 2-in-1 systems and they fill a similar role to Intel’s Atom. AMD says you’ll get better graphics performance from Mullins. The AMD E1 Micro-6200T is a 1.4 GHz dual-core processor with 300 MHz AMD Radeon R2 graphics. The chip has a 3.95W TDP. What is particularly daft about this as a test of Mullins ability is that HP gave the 10z a small 24Whr battery which can only manage four hours of life.

It also has 2GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, HDMI and Ethernet, a headset jack, stereo speakers, and an SD card reader. The system has a 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display. It measures 10.7? x 7.6? x 0.9? and weighs about 2.5 pounds. (For readers whose countries were not colonised by the British Empire, that's 27cm x 19.5cm x 23mm and 1.2kg. Ed)