AMD Reveals New Mobile Technologies

MojoKid writes "AMD disclosed a few details today regarding their upcoming mobile platform technologies, codenamed 'Griffin' and 'Puma'. According to AMD, Griffin will be manufactured at 65nm and it will feature a new mobile optimized on-die Northbridge with a power optimized DDR2 memory controller, HyperTransport 3 connectivity, and larger L2 caches than current designs. The new memory controller should also extend battery life thanks to new power saving features, that allow the controller to operate on a separate power plane and at a lower voltage than the execution cores."

Comments

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

larger L2 caches that current designs? Syntax error, line 4.

Low power, excellent ... now on graphics please

[Morgaine]

The CPU manufacturers seem to be focussed quite well on keeping their CPUs and motherboard chipsets within reasonable power limits, and this latest announcement by AMD is very promising. The situation is not quite so rosy in the 3D graphics chipset arena, as the review of the Radeon HD 2900 XT a few days ago highlighted ... The Tech Report had to upgrade their PC's PSU to 750W to achieve stability.

That's "not good", to put it mildly. If you extrapolate the power consumptions of graphics cards over the last decade or more into the future, it rapidly takes us into the realms of impossibility, except for those interested in Freon cooling and running their own power station in the back garden.

Something's got to change, and it has to be rather fundamental. Just decreasing die feature sizes has held back the rate of power consumption increases considerably, but that regular improvement is already factored in to this very bad upward curve we're on. We need something as dramatic as the change from MOS to CMOS was back in the day, which dropped consumption by orders of magnitude. If something like that doesn't happen, we're in big trouble.

AMD's work on decreasing power consumption is great (and so is Intel's), but please focus your ex-ATI team's efforts on reducing the power guzzling on *graphics*. That's where the major problem for the future lies at the moment.

Re:SFF PCs?

[norkakn]

At what resolution? 1080 might still be a problem. Last time I checked, non apple h264 blew pretty hard (I'm looking at you, VLC (and others)), so why not get get a mini or an apple TV?

Re:And what about PC-on-a-chip?

[Eukariote]

Having merged with ATI, AMD now has all the IP it needs to do such a device. AMD in fact has a so-called "Fusion" development program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion to do just that. The Silicon on Insulator (SOI) process technology that AMD (unlike Intel) uses for CPUs has low leakage and is well suited for low-power devices. So in the short term, while the GPU and CPU are still separate, good reductions in power consumption can already be had by switching the production of the GPU/chipset of mobile devices to SOI.

Re:And what about PC-on-a-chip?

[rbanffy]

They already do. They call it Geode http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863,00.html.

Re:SFF PCs?

[TheRaven64]

Last time I checked, non apple h264 blew pretty hard (I'm looking at you, VLC (and others)), Really? On my old G4 Powerbook (1.5GHz), VLC could play back 1080p H.264 from the Apple trailers web site (with CPU usage at over 90%), but Quicktime dropped frames. On my new Core 2 machine both can play 1080p back just fine with under 50% CPU utilisation. It's the main thing that makes me realise just how much faster the new machine is than the old; pretty much everything else is disk speed limited these days.