AMD Launches Turion Mobile Processor

justforaday writes "Earlier today, AMD launched their Turion mobile processor, which is based on the AMD64 architecture. This is set to compete directly with Intel's Centrino (Pentium-M) line of processors. Chips will initially be clocked between 1.6 and 2.0 GHz. Looks like we should be seeing some nice low-powered 64-bit notebooks in the near future."

Comments

Availability

[fembots]

In my town of 1.5M people, I haven't managed to find a store that sells AMD-powered laptop. We must be the forgotten ones.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

This may seem like a silly question, but won't that only be useful if the laptop is going to have more than 4GB of memory? How often does that happen?

Re:Question

[mp3phish]

your are correct. There are tons of compiler optimizations that can be done witht he athlon64 that cannot be done with any previous version of the x86 ISA... That being said, compiler technology isn't really taking advantage of this yet...

The real advantage to having an athlon64 in a laptop is power savings and raw memory bandwidth and ultra low latency...

For the first time ever (aside from crusoe but their mem bandwidth is not that much) we are seeing ultra low powered CPU's put into 12in sub-notebooks with on die memory controllers.. This is the single most advantageous feature of the athlon64. This is also packed into the Turion. This integrated memory controller means there is no exchange with an off die chip soldered onto the mobo (which adds several fold latency to every memory request and write). Instead, the CPU talks directly to main memory. This reduces memory latency to a fraction of intel's and older athlonXP laptops. and since latency is reduced significantly (im talking several times lower than the fastest centrino's memory controller) and memory efficiency is increased, you get much more memory bandwidth on top of all the above advantages.

It has already been shown in every reviewer's benchmarks that memory intensive applications run significantly faster on athlon64's than any other platform (including Intel P4 EE) This is due to raw bandwidth and raw quickness (latency)

Now, we can all sit here and say that the chip is capable of calculating 64 bit numbers without having to break it down, and that it is capable of running more than 4GB ram, and that it has more general purpose registers (which aren't taken advantage of when running winXP 32 btw) and that it has shed a lot of legacy logic which is implemented in microcode instead (like older stuff DOS uses)

But in the end it is the memory controller which is the real improvement with athlon64. The 64bit-ness of the chip, and all those other features will have their time to shine.. Just not in the near future (the lifetime of a new laptop you might buy this year)

price points

[bwthomas]

AMD Turion 64 mobile technology models ML-37, ML-34, ML-32, ML-30, MT-34, MT-32, and MT-30 are priced at $354, $263, $220, $184, $268, $225 and $189 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

Doesn't this seem like a high price for bulk chips?

What I'm interested in...

[PornMaster]

Are any of the major motherboard manufacturers going to put out a micro-ATX or smaller desktop motherboard for this to build a media PC upon?

Some Like it Hot, not Me Though

[slipnslidemaster]

Is there any information on it's thermal output? Is there a reference design for how laptops should be designed to handle the heat?

I'm in the market for a new tablet and while I love it, the Pentium M that I'm currently using turns my lap into a puddle of skin and rayon within a few minutes. I'm due for an upgrade and since AMD is always a leap or two ahead of Intel, I'm wondering about the heat.

Any thoughts?

Digital AlphaBook - 64 bit notebook in 1998

[BiggRanger]

I have a Digital AlphaBook, the first 64 bit notebook computer! 266 MHz Alpha Processor (EV4 I think) 128 Meg RAM, and runs OpenVMS! Best of all I got it back in 1998. Nobody was even thinking 64 bit desktops back then. And you know what, it still rocks. I've rebuilt the battery pack and still use it today. You should see poeples face when VMS is booting up and it goes into the DEC windows manager.

Re:Digital AlphaBook - 64 bit notebook in 1998

[msbsod]

Too bad they don't make them anymore! The future for a new OpenVMS/Itanium notebook looks extremely bad. HP does not want to kick Microsoft's a$$ with a real good operating system for the desktop and notebook market. And Intel dropped all plans to produce an Itanium for desktop machines (Itanium was suppose to be The 64-bit replacement for the Pentium!), not to mention any plans for a notebook version of the Itanium. AMD understands that a processor has to cover a broad market. Well done, AMD!

kind of late?

[bogaboga]

Aren't AMD kind-of late? When one talks about mobile computing, "centrino" comes to mind. Right?

Re:Intel / AMD = Microsoft / ???

[Elranzer]

IMO the ration seems to be... Intel/AMD/IBM = Windows/Linux/MaxOSX

Re:Hype64

[drinkypoo]

Have you noticed that the Hammer core runs 32 bit applications faster than either the corresponding[-speed] Athlon XP part, or the competing Pentium 4 part?

You don't even have to use it as 64 bit to get benefits from using a laptop with this new core. The power management in the Opteron and Athlon64 is also a bit better than the power management in the mobile Athlon, from what I understand, and I'm not even talking about Turion here, just the normal processors.

Re:Low Power? Better Link

[Surt]

What they commonly have is a much much slower hard drive, which you notice when loading apps or large files. 4200 rpm is most common, 5400 less so, and 7200 rpm quite rare. Any typical desktop has at least a 7200 rpm drive, and quite commonly 10k or even 15k rpm drives. You can get a surprising amount of perceived speed boost by ordering a laptop with a 7200 rpm drive.

Re:So that means...

[Animaether]

It's modded Funny for obvious reasons, but I think it should be noted that this is in fact not a laptop; it is a notebook.

Then again, I don't know when I last saw an actual laptop. The terms laptop and notebook have been used as if they're synonyms for quite a while now.

The difference between the two should be obvious. One is designed for use truly 'on the go' - on your lap when riding the bus if need be. That'd be the laptop.
A notebook, on the other hand, may be portable and easy to carry around - but is primarily intended to be used in a proper workspace - and thus on a table/desk/whathaveyou.. just not your lap.

Other differing factors are:
- overall weight (you don't typically want 6lbs+ on your lap, or carry it around a lot)
- overall size (notebook with giant display, too bulky)
- balance (don't want something on your lap that tends to tip over to the left due to all the major electronics being on that side)
- heat (heat should be dissipated and fanned out to the side, airflow intake should be coming from the other side, the back, or in the center/towards the back (so as not to get covered by one's thigh)
- access ports, auxiliary button should be on the side (otherwise you have to set the computer aside when, for example, loading a DVD and the DVD bay inserts at the front. oops..

And probably a few more points I've forgotten since I took that ergonomics class.

speed boost... but detremental power savings...

[mp3phish]

Yes.. you can take the advice of the parent poster... but let me explain a couple things which dictate that 7200RPM laptop drives are not always better....

1) Drive density: a laptop drive at 80GB is roughly twice as dense (bytes per square inch) than an 80GB desktop hard drive

2) Head travel time: In a 2.5in laptop drive, the hard drive head does not have to traverse more than ~1in (from center to outter track) of the drive to do any given seek. A desktop drive must traverse roughly 50% more distance (and time) on random seeks

3) Heat: 5400RPM drives produce significantly less heat than 7200RPM drives.. on top of this, a 5400RPM drive built with the same quality as a 7200RPM drive has significantly longer average lifetime.

4) Noise: Equivilently built drives one running at 5400RPM and one at 7200RPM. The 7200RPM is significantly louder and produces high pitched noise (nowadays, all laptop drives are hydro bearings so you can't cop out and say that a cheaper 5400RPM drive will use cheaper ball bearings... like you used to be able to say)

5) battery life: less heat == less watts == less power consumption. Remember that the hard drive is the second largest drain on your battery when talking about centrino/turion systems (LCD is the first). In a P4 laptop then the CPU uses more power than the drive. a 5400RPM or 4200RPM drive has faster spin up times. It has lower sustained power consumption, and will generally give you a longer battery life on the order of an half to full hour or so in a midsized notebook using default battery.

6) Data integrity/ruggedness: a slower spinning hard drive will not have as detremental of an affect on your data if the drive is bumped during reads/writes. Think of it as hitting a large speed bump going 54MPH vs going 72MPH.

Now some of this needs explanation: (1) tells about drive density. What this means is that a 7200RPM 3.5in drive is about as fast as a 5400RPM 2.5in drive in sustained reads/writes. (2) tells about seek time (latency). A laptop drive at 5400RPM has a faster seek than a desktop at 5400RPM. I will admit that a 7200RPM desktop drive has faster seeks, but not significantly so. A faster spinning drive can seek faster only when the head is in place and it must wait for the drive to rotate to the corect angle in order to read the requested data. It does NOT make the head travel faster. For this reason high RPM speeds are good and well for seek time... but using smaller platters is also a very good way to reduce seek time. Not to mention that loading programs and loading large video files or photoshop files, etc... are not highly seek dependant. They are sequential read dependant. Database accesses, or accessing a badly fragmented hard drive are cases where faster seek will help you out. But in a laptop system where you are loading programs and files and keep your disk defragmented it will do you very little good.

Now.. I'm not saying that 10K and 15K rpm drives are bad... they are great for seek time and they are great for high transaction/sec databases... What they are overkill for is desktop systems which the user would typically be loading programs or transferring files from one disk to another or loading large files... Because most 10K drives are around 36GB or 74GB... and they are actually marginally _SLOWER_ at sequential read/write than cheaper and larger 7200RPM drives on the desktop....

now.. Apply all of the above to a laptop 5400RPM drive vs the standard desktop drive of 7200RPM.. I hope you are able to see what I'm getting at. a 7200RPM drive in a laptop is significantly faster than an equivilently sized desktop drive at 7200RPMs... Anybody who says they feel a slowdown on 5400RPM laptop drives vs. a 7200RPM desktop drive is either using very low GB laptop drive, or very large GB desktop drive, or is just fooling themselves... In general, a 5400RPM laptop drive performs approximately the same as a 7200RPM desktop drive in most end user desktop applications...