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AMD Plants Turion Line of Mobile Chips
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."
Looks like I'll have to buy Intel or Apple for my next laptop then.
...does this mean that the Turion is named after the fastest of all roots, the turnip?
#include "cunning_plan.h"
Turion and Centrino need to have adventures in a magical Roman wonderland. I think Nick Junior could do this justice ...
"The company said it considered the dictionary definition too rare to hinder the chip's prospects."
Well, at least they KNOW it's a shitty name.
Isn't the CPU a Pentium III M?
I thought I had the wrong site for a minute.
I was expecting CPU trees and shrubs. Hanging baskets overflowing with ddr modules.
A garden shed filled with all kind of GNU/Linux branded tools, and a Microsoft compost heap.
Infact, all sorts of strange things came to mind.
anyway, it doesn't matter, nothing to see here, please move along.
liqbase
"A thick fleshy young shoot or sucker, such as an emerging stem of asparagus."
Seldom has a new cpu made me feel so tingly inside.
Duron was pretty close to 'Celeron' in name.
Turion sounds like some person or place from The Silmarillion.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Hi kids, this is Bob the Turion, and his sidekick, Larry the Celeron.
Stinkiest of all fruits.
What colour flowers does it produce? And do they attract butterflies?
Last of all, when is my local garden centre going to stock them?
Anyone else find it interesting that the Celeron was named after a fast vegetable?
The only 64bit laptops I've ever seen were AMDs.
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.
The rapid radish is by far the swiftest of all vegetable crops! Kneel to the power of the radish! Bow, I tell you!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The article is factually wrong. I took a stick of celery, a beetroot, an artichoke, and a handful of lettuce and put them at one end of a track. At the other was a bowl of water and a sunlamp, to give them an incentive.
After 5 minutes, they were all STILL moving at the SAME speed! One hour later, they are still neck and neck although the lettuce is beginning to look a little worn-out.
I've had about enough of people pumping up one particular fruit or vegetable, with NO BASIS in actual testing. MOST vegetables travel at the SAME SPEED (unless you drop one, or fire it from a gun, or something) and there is no point paying more for a faster one.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
AMD doesn't need to release a whole new line of processors just to compete with the Celeron -- they've had the Celeron beaten for years. AMD's Duron line was consistently cheaper and faster than Celeron -- I refer you to any one of a number of tech sites. Anandtech had a good "budget processor" article comparing Durons and Celerons a while back. Tom's Hardware would do too.
More recently, AMD released the Sempron, meant to replace the Duron as its budget-level processor. Consider Anandtech's conclusion from a Sempron vs. Celeron test they did last July:
"Sempron, at a glance, surpasses its goal to be a powerful budget processor. Cheaper than the current fastest Intel Celeron, both flavors of Sempron that we tested here outperform the competition in almost every test."
In the performance market segment, Intel and AMD have been locked in battle for ages -- sometimes one is up, sometimes the other -- but if you're building a budget system, AMD offers more bang for less buck.
I'll be interested to see how this unfortunately named "Turion" chip compares to the PentiumM.
AMD's announcement comes following their failed "Alderon" line of chips, which after just a few months in production were all simultaneously destroyed by a giant moon-shaped pun laser.
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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.
I'm waiting for an AMD Boron myself. Nothing fast and hot, just a nice underspecced chip that doesn't need a fan that sounds like a jet plane taking off. Just reliable and boring.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
"Intel didn't design the Centrino CPU's...some 3rd party Indian fab did. And they look a lot more like an AMD or Motorola chip than an Intel."
Sorry, that's just wrong. The Pentium M is based on a Pentium III core, and it was designed by Intel engineers in Israel.
Despite a poor showing initially, the lettuce DID win, taking advantage of a light breeze to flutter over the finish line! Some of the lettuce wound up off the track but I feel this is acceptable.
I am sorry to say that the celery finished second equals with the other vegetables -- a poor showing for a plant touted as 'the fastest of all vegetables'.
I would like to point out to other posters that the performance of the jumping bean and asparagus is not relevant -- the claim being tested is that celery is 'the fastest of all vegetables' and it is NO FASTER THAN AN ORDINARY COMMODITY ARTICHOKE.
In the light of this test, I have decided not to put celery in my computer.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
... 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.