Tuesday, June 3, 2008
AMD Unveils Turion X2 Ultra and AMD Turion X2 Mobile Processor Platform
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 09:12 PM
AMD has officially unveiled their new mobile computing platform, formerly known as the codename Puma, and it looks like an impressive step forward for mobile technology. Unfortunately I missed a conference call earlier this week that had some pertinent details, but I was send a slide deck to glean some facts from. I'll do my best to present the facts about this new platform, but expect to see me linking to someone else that knows more about this than I do (which isn't hard to do) by tomorrow.
To begin with, we know that notebooks are increasingly being used for entertainment - and China leads the way with 97% of users indicating they use their notebooks for that purpose. Europe comes next with 83%, and North Americans trail with 76%. Not surprisingly, you see people living in cultures which higher population density using their computers more for entertainment - the laptop likely replacing the TV in many homes as the primary source of entertainment. AMD has created a platform they believe will serve the needs of this market (oh yeah, and those business/enterprise types as well).
The AMD Turion X2 Ultra processor is at the centre of this platform, featuring independent dynamic core technology, AMD CoolCore technology, Power Optimized HyperTransprt 3.0, and a mobile optimized memory controller. All are technologies optimized for long battery life - that's what the slide tells me at least. The AMD 7-series chipsets (780G and SB700) bring other powerful offerings to the table: DirectX 10 support, PCIe 2nd generation speeds, enhanced ATI Avivo HD Block (MPEG2, H.264, and VC1 playback), ATI Hybrid Graphics, lower power/lower noise levels, HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort support. The ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU, which I assume is at the core of those chipsets (don't quote me on that!) offer 2.9 times the performance of the GPU used by Intel in their Santa Rosa platform. Intel's well-known for their underpowered integrated GPU performance, so I don't find that difference hard to believe. Read more...