News AMD's Centrino challenger: Turion

News from Vegas, courtesy of news.com - AMD's Centrino-a-like CPU, Turion:

Turion is the brand name of a new line of energy-efficient notebook processors Advanced Micro Devices will come out with in the first half of 2005. It is chipmaker's response to Intel's Centrino notebook technology, company executives said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

While the company did not reveal any technical specifications on the chip, AMD said Turion will fit into thin and light notebooks and be optimized for extending battery power. Currently, AMD mostly sells notebook chips for "performance" notebooks, which provide desktoplike computing power but can sap batteries and generate heat.

The company's Athlon 64 notebook chips come with thermal ceilings ranging from 25 watts to 62 watts. By contrast, the Pentium M, the processor at the heart of the Centrino chip bundle, has a thermal ceiling of about 20 watts. The thermal ceiling gauges how much heat the processor can produce without endangering the performance of the notebook.

More, as always, here

Turion? as in CEN-Turion? making it sound a bit like CEN-Trino?

 

Well, to be honest for my notebooks, I will be sticking with Intel ....

Unless AMD come out with something far better than the Centrino. The centrino has been on the market for a while and have no major problems.

 

Sound intresting I wonder if they are going to make a new socket for it. If they use the 939 package it would be nice for a media center PC

 

Unless it can match the centrino in power to performance to battery life stakes then i doubt itll be worth too much.
However, the integrated memory controller (??) will mean only a southbridge is needed = less heat and more space for other stuff inside. Also, you know it may even be compatible with desktop boards?? depending on the socket - im supprised AMD havent developed a upga package for their cpus yet.

edit: i doubt itll be 939, more single channel memory 754 range = less pins and less traces. Also notebook manuf. only have to use 1 memory slot, not 2.

 

Bindi a LOT of notebooks have two slots for ram. In fact I don't think I've seen one that doesn't, including the first I used some ten years ago with a greyscale LCD. Granted there are a few with an internal slot which makes upgrading it a pain (and is really meant to be left alone) but it's still there.

 

Yea, i know, mine does but that wasnt my point. Notebook companies dont want to have to install ram pairs in 2. They want to have at least 1 slot for user upgradability (which will probably be purchased from their site) or they want to have the ability to offer "free double ram upgrade" or "free 256meg ram extra" if they feel like it. It doesnt make economic sense to HAVE to install 2 sticks of identical ram in a notebook when there are only 2 slots avaliable.
Indeed, some do come with 2 sticks - 2x256meg for example, but 1x512 and 1x256 may be wanted, to cut costs and offer more than a competitors 512meg say. 768meg doesnt cost as much as a gig but is a marketable difference over 512. Also, the jump over 1gig is extremely expensive when looking at dual channel.

 

its the lancaster core from the roadmaps - and being 90nm with SOI and low voltage - i can see it being a good competitior to the centrino