Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Plants Turion Line of Mobile Chips

Posted by michael on from the watch-it-grow dept.

dsginter writes "Today, AMD has blessed us with their Turion line of chips. Though it is supposed to compete with Intel's Centrino line, with such a name, one has to wonder if AMD is going after the Celeron, the name of which is derived from the latin word, 'celer', meaning 'fast' or 'swift', as in 'celery' - the fastest of all vegetables."

7 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. I thought centrino was the supporting chipset. by glrotate · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't the CPU a Pentium III M?

  2. Re:If the Celeron is named after celery... by chowdmouse · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Well according to the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board an asparagus planting is typically harvested after 3 years. Celery in your typical home garden is ready to cut after 90-120 days (according to this information from UC Davis.)

    So it looks like Celeron takes it. You should sell your AMD stock now.

    It is amazing where Slashdot takes me some days.

  3. Re:AMD has that much laptop market share!? by IANAAC · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only 64bit laptops I've ever seen were AMDs.

  4. CentTurion? by Lispy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think they were after a pun for the ancient roman general: The Centurion

    Centrino - Turion

    This makes more sense to me than the celery ananlogy.

  5. Re:Ever wondered.. by hattig · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a massive difference between designing a microprocessor with lots of different functional units, especially one that has to be compatible with a crufty ISA like x86, and compete in terms of performance and price with the market leaders, than designing a graphics core.

    The "Centrino CPU" was designed by Intel you idiot, the core is a tweaked PIII with power management and other stuff, and the system interface has merely been upgraded to the P4 bus for greater bandwidth.

    There's a big difference between transistors that need to operate at 600MHz and those that need to operate at 3+ GHz as well, that is where the major difference in power consumption comes in. Consider that the Pentium M uses under 20W (a lot less than a graphics card does) and competes very well with a fast P4 in many areas. It is the last extra bit of performance that costs.

  6. Yes, it's a goofy name, when can I buy one? by Brian+Stretch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The new Turion 64's are intended for the new thin-and-light notebooks like these: regular and widescreen. The eMachines/Gateway AMD64 notebooks are built by Arima, so I'd expect these things to show up under the Gateway label.

    I'd prefer a nVidia chipset and GPU though for 64-bit Linux compatibility, like my current HP zv5000z has. It'll be interesting to see what HP has to offer in the way of Turion notebooks.

  7. The question is... by Entropius · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... what sort of advantage do these chips have over the low voltage Athlon 64 mobiles? From what I understand, those have the power economy of the
    Centrinos but much better performance.