Techiton

For the next few months, the big battleground is likely to be in notebook computer platforms, where both companies have new offerings, many of which are being rolled out at this week’s Computex show in Taiwan. AMD today formally introduced its new notebook platform, which has been referred to under the code-name of Puma, though officially it’s just the next generation notebook platform. The CPU is the Turion X2 Ultra chip (formerly code-named “Griffin”), which basically is two K8 cores (the same cores used in the Athlon processors) with some interesting new features: independent dynamic cores let the chip set different power levels for each core and the integrated “north bridge” chip, power optimized HyperTransport 3; a a mobile-optimized memory controller designed for DDR-800 memory.

The heart of the platform is the new 7-series chipset with support for the ATI Mobility Radeon 3000 family of graphics and Wi-Fi support from a third-party chipset (such as Atheros, Broadcom, or Marvell). The graphics come in several flavors. Most distinctive is the HD 3000 integrated graphics solution, which includes support for Avivo HD (for better hardware-assistend HD decode). AMD believes this will far outperform Intel’s integrated graphics. AMD says this solution will offer three times the 3D performance, 5 times the HD quality, and 40% faster wireless than Intel’s solution. I’m a bit skeptical on some of these numbers, but the proof will be in the final notebooks.

Source: PCWorld