AMD's Puma stalks Centrino

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith

Posted on 4 Jun 2008 at 07:45

AMD has announced the full details of its new laptop platform, codenamed Puma - although the company has admitted it doesn't have the resources to go head-to-head with Intel's Centrino.

The system brings together the new Turion ultra-mobile processor, the Mobility Radeon HD 3000 range of GPUs and a range of wireless-networking controllers.

The new Turions are codenamed Griffin. Like their predecessors, they're dual-core chips with a low TDP of around 35 watts.

Models range from the RM-70, running at 2GHz with 1MB of L2 cache, up to the top-end ZM-86, running at 2.4GHz with a 2MB cache. All chips support DDR2-800 and HyperTransport 3.0.

GPUs span from the Mobility Radeon HD 3200 GPU - effectively a rebadged HD 2400, as found on AMD's 780G-based motherboards - up to the Mobility Radeon 3870 X2. All include AMD's dedicated video decoding hardware, reducing the CPU and battery demands of decoding high-definition media.

For added flexibility, Puma laptops will also feature an eight-lane PCI-Express 2.0 port. This can be connected via a proprietary cable to a mains-powered box containing a full-sized graphics card, enabling easy GPU upgrades. AMD calls this feature XGP (for "eXternal Graphics Processor").

There's flexibility on the wireless front too, with manufacturers free to choose from a range of chipsets from Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell.

AMD claims that one draft-n controller, the Atheros AR9280, transfers files 38% more quickly than the Intel 4965AGN found in Intel's Centrino platform.

AMD acknowledges that it has little control over how manufacturers implement the Puma platform. "We don't own the notebook," admitted senior product manager Ian McNaughton at the launch in Monaco. "We can't guarantee some manufacturer won't pick Marvell's cheapest solution and the performance is not there any more."

And McNaughton confirmed that, like the Spider desktop platform released last November, Puma isn't destined to be a consumer brand. "We don't have a Centrino-type programme," he explained. "I wish we did. If you have any ideas how we could do that for less than $350 million, we can talk later."