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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."
...does this mean that the Turion is named after the fastest of all roots, the turnip?
#include "cunning_plan.h"
"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.
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.
It's "Pentium M".
The processors themselves have the codenames Banias (1MB 130nm part) and Dothan (2MB 90nm part).
These AMD processors are most likely to be revision E0 core Athlon 64s. The E0 core is said to reduce power consumption by 25% over the D0 core. If processors have a 25W TDP already in the A64M range, then AMD should easily be able to get it down to 20W to compete with the Pentium M.
Of course, the A64M will have half a northbridge incorporated into the processor, something that isn't included in the Pentium M TDP at the moment. Also the definition of Intel's TDP is different from AMD's TDP. Whilst arguments reign over the exact difference, it is agrees that Intel's processors generally run much closer to their TDP figure than AMD's.
Also, the 533MHz Dothan processor, until recently, had a 27W TDP figure, because of the faster bus.
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.
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 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.
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.