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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."
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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?
It's not like AMD has been stellar in the mobile processor world before this. Centrino has been a no-brainer for a while in the laptop world.
Article without the annoying green advertisement links.
Expected to Launch Notebook PCs Worldwide in Coming Months
AMD today introduced AMD Turion 64 mobile technology, the latest in a succession of computing innovations based on the industry-leading AMD64 architecture. AMD Turion 64 mobile technology is uniquely optimized to bring award-winning AMD64 performance to thinner and lighter notebook PCs with longer battery life, enhanced security, and compatibility with the latest graphics and wireless solutions, both today and tomorrow.
Together with industry-leading partners, AMD enables a best-in-class ecosystem of open industry-standard technologies, helping PC manufacturers to deliver feature-rich systems that satisfy the variety of ways in which people use their notebooks.
"By embracing a broad partner community and industry standards, AMD is both providing choice and stimulating innovation," said Roger Kay, vice president of Client Computing at IDC.
"We have unleashed 64-bit mobile performance, allowing business professionals and on-the-go consumers to explore the freedom of mobile productivity with AMD Turion 64 mobile technology," said Marty Seyer, corporate vice president and general manager, Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD. "This is just the first of many innovations that we are planning to pioneer with this new product family made for mobility, choice and best-in-class notebook designs."
Leading global manufacturers, hardware vendors and software suppliers have expressed support for AMD Turion 64 mobile technology. "Fujitsu welcomes AMD Turion 64 mobile technology innovation, and we congratulate AMD on their success," said Mr. Kazuhiro Igarashi, general manager, Mobile PC Division, Personal Business Group for Fujitsu Limited.
Business professionals and consumers worldwide can expect to see notebooks based on AMD Turion 64 mobile technology starting later this month in retail stores and through commercial distribution channels. The first systems are expected from Acer worldwide and Fujitsu Siemens Computers throughout Europe.
"We have had a great deal of success with our Ferrari branded notebooks based on AMD64 technology," said Walter Deppeler, senior corporate vice president, Acer Inc. "We look forward to continued success with our forthcoming notebook designs based on AMD Turion 64 mobile technology."
"As the leading European IT provider, we offer our customers world-class computing technology," said Herbert Schonebeck, Vice President Business Unit Consumer, Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "We are introducing innovative consumer notebook PCs based on AMD Turion 64 mobile technology to provide our customers efficient platforms to connect from virtually anywhere."
In addition, ASUS, Averatec, BenQ, MSI and Packard Bell are among the leading, global computer manufacturers who have indicated they will support AMD Turion 64 mobile technology.
Availability
AMD Turion 64 mobile technology models ML-37, ML-34, ML-32, ML-30, MT-34, MT-32, and MT-30 are available immediately worldwide.
In order to help consumers and business professionals simplify their notebook purchasing decisions, AMD Turion 64 mobile technology uses a new series of model numbers designed to provide a simple designation of both relative performance and degree of mobility within the processor family. The two letters of this model number indicate processor class, with the second letter designating increasing degree of mobility, as measured by power consumption.(a) As the second letter approaches the end of the alphabet, "higher" letters indicate greater mobility. The numbers indicate relative performance within the processor class. Higher numbers indicate higher relative performance among the AMD Turion 64 mobile technology family.
Pricing
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.
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?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
First, why such a lame link for this post? Here's a more informative one Editors, sheesh!
Ok, let's look at this without the rose coloured glasses:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I swear they started back in January
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If you tell someone about your computer processor, and you cough slightly while you say the processor name, you end up with a Turing machine. If only it were true...
I really wish we could complete that ratio.
No, I'm not saying that Intel is as bad as Microsoft (although those recent anti-trust actions might make one wonder). I'm just saying that look how well things have turned out for the consumer on the processor front because there's a viable alternative.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a competitor for Microsoft the way AMD competes with Intel?
No. How long have you been following CPU pricing? It's always high for the first offerings. By this time next year you'll see half that line discontinued and the remainder heavily discounted.
Rule #1 regarding technology: As soon as it hits store shelves, it's already obsolete.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...my new laptop won't lower sperm count? Seriously, I can't stand putting a hot laptop on (oddly enough) my lap, so they become tabletops instead for me.
These Turions better generate less heat or I'd have lost all hope. And feeling in my groin.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This should be a very interesting product for the silent computing community (check SilentPCRReview) if some manufacturer decides to make desktop motherboards for it. People are already using Mobile Athlon XP's and Pentium-M's in desktop computers because of their relatively low heat output.
My own wish would be to some day have a passively air cooled computer. Running an Athlon64 passively with only one big slow (=nearly silent) case fan is already feasible with carefully managed airflow inside the computer case. Turion could be theoretically cool enough to cool with convection airflow if the potential is realized with wellmade motherboards.
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.
The reason why Pentium-M is as performant as it is is in part because it has 2MB of on-die cache. Don't expect miracles from a chip that has a half or even one fourth of that.
Aren't AMD kind-of late? When one talks about mobile computing, "centrino" comes to mind. Right?
Maybe because you gain more than you lose by going to the 90nm 64bit architecture? It's faster and cooler than the chip it replaces. It just happens to be 64bit at well.
It's not like AMD just said "hey, lets blow some smoke up the consumers arse and put a 64 bit processor in a laptop!". If you hadn't noticed they've been moving in this direction for say, a couple years now.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was under the impression that high-end Pentium M's ran in the $600 range. Those prices actually struck me as quite low.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I'm not really into carnivorous plants, so I hadn't heard this word before.
Here's a WAV pronunciation.
tur-e-on
Not very phonetic. Shouldn't product names be easy to read without hearing them?
I imagine that I'll hear many tur-yun's, tur-eye-un's, and too-rye-un's.
Keep in mind these chips have integrated memory controllers and northbridges unlike Pentium-m's. Northbridges alone use about 5W of power so this could be subtracted from their consumption for a more accurate comparision of the two.
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise
they use 754 http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_12651_12658,00.html
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...
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Centrino + Turion = Centurion
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
That's true, however it's a dirty hack. The extra memory is only addressable in 4GB (or 2GB) segments. Therefore, if you have an application that needs more than 4GB in a contiguous chunk, you are out of luck. You could probably fake it with operating system calls and complicated wrpper functions to hide the memory address arithmetic. However, you loose a lot of performance.
It's a bit like the old days of the 8086 and 80286 where memory was in 64k segments and there were segment registers used in conjunction with index registers to calculate addresses. As you can imagine, writing programs with datastructures larger than 64k was complicated and bug-prone due to the added complexity. It also slowed the program down significantly due to the extra calculations required.
So you see, a much better, cleaner, more efficient solution to the problem is to have a flat 64-bit address space, like the AMD64 architecture.
Of course, intel tried very hard to pretend that no-one "needs" 64-bits on the desktop for many years while they tried to peddle the dreadful itanium for servers and workstations. They hoped that naieve users would believe them long enough until they could get itanium PCs out in the mass market. Then along came AMD with a much better processor...
Stick Men