AMD's Turion To Rival Intel's Centrino

KingFish

AMD is upping the ante in its fight against Intel's mobile Centrino brand.

The chipmaker announced a new 64-bit processor family named Turion, which it says will eventually replace its current AMD Athlon Mobile lineup in the low-power space. Processor speed information and pricing were not disclosed.

The company said the first batch of Turion chips should appear in the first part of 2005. OEMs are expected to debut the processors in thin-and-light notebooks and will eventually show up in desktop replacement PCs. AMD said it would also continue to support its mobile Sempron products for value-priced mobile computers.

"Turion could really go up against Pentium M and Centrino," Bahr Mahony, a division marketing manager with AMD's mobile processor group, told internetnews.com. "When we sent out questionnaires to our customers and partners, people indicated that we need a specific mobility brand ... a technology transition based on the AMD64 architecture. Many said this was a long time in coming."

AMD said Turion also supports the company's "PowerNow" battery-saving regulator technology. Mahony said the company would continue to offer its 62-watt processors under its Athlon brand and support AMD's silicon-based Virus Protection in conjunction with Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Source: Internet News

Shorty

This... should be interesting... provided AMD do have a real killer up their sleeves. Gotta face facts, when it comes to mobile processors ... Centrino is king.

muddocktor

Shorty wrote:

Gotta face facts, when it comes to mobile processors ... Centrino is king.

Not quite so, Shorty; Pentium M is King. Centrino is something the marketing flacks for Intel thought up for the whole chipset/cpu/wireless combo.

Thrax

Shorty brings up a point even when not trying to. Intel has successfully sold a <i>package</i> of components, that simply gives an identifiable name to a group of components that would probably go together anyways. Centrino is the Pentium-M as far as everyone on the mortal computing level is concerned; and it's selling like hotcakes. AMD has to do just this, or they will fail with the Turion; they need to market a comprehensive set of features under a single name.

muddocktor

I agree with you Thrax, but AMD doesn't do chipsets or wireless, like Intel.

Shorty

Thrax wrote:

Shorty brings up a point even when not trying to. Intel has successfully sold a <i>package</i> of components, that simply gives an identifiable name to a group of components that would probably go together anyways. Centrino is the Pentium-M as far as everyone on the mortal computing level is concerned; and it's selling like hotcakes. AMD has to do just this, or they will fail with the Turion; they need to market a comprehensive set of features under a single name.

Thrax understood what I meant

Geeky1

*scratches head*

Mudd... what exactly do you mean that AMD doesn't do chipsets or wireless? Wireless they may or may not do (they make flash RAM and all sorts of other stuff so it wouldn't really surprise me) but they absolutely do make chipsets...

Shorty

Geeky1 wrote:

*scratches head*

Mudd... what exactly do you mean that AMD doesn't do chipsets or wireless? Wireless they may or may not do (they make flash RAM and all sorts of other stuff so it wouldn't really surprise me) but they absolutely do make chipsets...

But they do not promote or market it as a technology set. This is the point. Centrino is a brand. Right now, AMD is just promoting a chip.

muddocktor

Like Shorty says, yep!

Geeky, I know that AMD does make chipsets when they absolutely have to, but they try to pawn it off on all the 3rd party guys like Via and Nvidia and Sis if they can, which is a mistake in my book. They have come out with good chipsets in the past, but they don't update them. Look at the latest chipset they put out for Opteron; it's a year old now and no updated chipset and if I'm not mistaken, it only had (and still has) USB 1.1 support.

If you look for a more modern dual proc chipset, you only see Nvidia and Via in the lineup, not AMD.

Omega65

AMD Doesn't have the excess FAB capacity like Intel does to make chipsets and whatnot. Letting Nvidia and VIA make their chipsets is a neccesary evil....

muddocktor

I don't know about that. When they converted Austin from manufacturing cpu's to making flash memory, it seems to me that they could have converted some of that room for making chipsets. Of course, that would have involved hiring more folks to design and fab the chipsets too. I guess it's just rough being the Avis of cpu manufacturers. If they were smart, they would get with someone like Via or Nvidia to design them a wireless solution that could be bundled with the Turion and appropriate chipsetset to have an integrated solution like Intel.

Thrax

"some of that room" isn't anywhere near enough to produce chipsets in market volume.

TheLostSwede

Now that nVidia are in bed with Intel, they will certainly not help out AMD with a chipset. I agree though, that AMD have made some of the best chipsets ever. KG7 was the most stable board i have ever had. You could beat it with a hammer, spill soldering everywhere but it still works. You can't even sneeze at todays boards before they get a corrupted bios.

Shorty

Mackanz wrote:

Now that nVidia are in bed with Intel, they will certainly not help out AMD with a chipset. I agree though, that AMD have made some of the best chipsets ever. KG7 was the most stable board i have ever had. You could beat it with a hammer, spill soldering everywhere but it still works. You can't even sneeze at todays boards before they get a corrupted bios.

Ain't that the truth