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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."
larger L2 caches that current designs? Syntax error, line 4.
How viable are these for sticking into a SFF PC, to be used as a small media center capable of playing h264. That's what I want to know :)
I wonder how long before AMD makes a PC-on-a-chip, like VIA did.
Now with ATI they should have all the required components for that (good graphics controller etc).
I am thinking ultra ultra portable =)
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
AMD badly needed to compete with Intel in the mobile computing market, and the Puma platform should get them some design wins, which would hopefully fuel a price war between the Puma and Santa Rosa platforms. At the risk of sounding cliched, the ultimate winner would be the customer. Unfortunately, despite AMD's efforts, I still think that AMD would be a marginal player in the mobile segment for some time to come, and would mainly competing with Intel C2Ds on price. I have yet to see AMD make compelling chips and platform designs for low power and ultra low-power laptops, for example. I would love to see it happen though, as this is one area where Intel is plainly getting away with overpricing their chips and platform solutions.
What surprises me is why AMD is not putting in more efforts in making better mobile chips and platforms, when this is the one segment that is truly growing at a compounded rate. Heck, Centrino (and P-M) was the one and only reason that Intel managed to make a profit in the inglorious P4 days. One clear use case that I see is in corporations transitioning from desktops to laptops is simply "work-life balance". With the crazy hours that people are working nowadays, and the fact that broadband has become affordable, this will be the one carrot that more and more companies will dangle to keep their employees reasonably happy. Furthermore, as computers become commodities, people will increasingly look at differentiators such as mobility, ease of use, and connectivity instead of flexibility which was the desktop's forte. The only way in which this can truly happen though is if laptop prices start matching desktops in price and to some extent, in performance. In fact, performance is increasingly becoming irrelevant as most dual-cores and quad-cores are overkill for most users, even your so-called "power" users. Except for some niche areas like CAD or image processing, I have yet to see users complain because they are bottlenecked by their processor. Most users do get bottlenecked by their RAM or battery life (in case of laptops) though.
As long as the advertisements don't include weight (and adapter weight if possible) and battery life in their commercials, it might not be worth it to go for the ultra-compatible arena. Here in the Netherlands at least they even put in commercials for ultra-thins without noting the weight and the battery life, even if these figures are more than decent. The difference seems to be made by a 80 or 100 GB HDD, which I don't care about for a bit.