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."

Comments

If the Celeron is named after celery...

[TheSwirlingMaelstrom]

...does this mean that the Turion is named after the fastest of all roots, the turnip?

Re:I thought centrino was the supporting chipset.

[hattig]

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.