AMD’s Mobile Hopes Ride on Puma Platform

With new processors and graphics cards targeting mobile entertainment users, AMD will attempt to fight back against Intel's successful mobile Centrino platform.

Hurting from Intel’s domination of the growing notebook market, AMD launched its comeback attempt on Wednesday with its new mobile platform, dubbed Puma. Combining its new Turion X2 Ultra chips with its Radeon HD graphics cards, AMD claims the Puma platform will bring better performance to games and HD movies than Intel’s offerings, and hopes to scrape back its share of the market.

The new Turion X2 Ultra processors will boast a range of technical improvements aimed mainly at improving efficiency, from AMD’s Independent Dynamic Core Technology, which can help save power by running each core at a different speed, to a new mobile-optimized memory controller, and power-optimized HyperTransport 3.0.

AMD claims its new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 triples the performance of previous-generation mobile Radeons, but also keeps an eye on power consumption. ATI’s PowerXpress technology, for instance, will run the graphics processor full bore when plugged into an external power source, but scale it back significantly to extend battery life on the run. The new 55nm chip design should also be more efficient, and run cooler. Since some new notebooks will come with both integrated and discrete graphics cards, AMD has even tailored its CrossFireX technology to allow both to run at the same time.

Puma components are already available to manufacturers, and Puma-based notebooks from companies including Acer, Asus, Clevo, Fujitsu, HP, MSI, NEC and Toshiba will be forthcoming.