Thursday, March 10, 2005

Gimme! Redux

AMD announced it's Turion mobile processor line today. SiS announced a mobile chipset to support that line, and ATI has one out as well. Where is my laptop?!?

Anyway, the new processors are all 90nm SOI low-power chips with the latest AMD 64-bit cores - with support for SSE2, SSE3, etc. - though they sport the older Socket-754-style, single memory channel interface with the rest of the system. They won't be outrunning the desktop 64-bit AMD stuff, but they won't fall very far behind them either, and they will do it on far less power and will generate far less heat. They are competitive with Intel's Centrino stuff in this regard, but the Centrino line is still purely 32-bit. Very nice 32-bit, though.

If all goes according to plan, a few laptop makers should have some new designs out later this month sporting these new chips and chipsets. I expect to see mostly the ATI chipset in them, since it's been announced for a few weeks now, and includes a decent video solution right there in the chipset itself. Again, this embedded video won't light the world on fire, but it should be a big step up for most laptops, and you can still use a discrete video solution where warranted.

So, low-power, cool, 64-bit, solid video, PCI Express, all the modern chipset stuff like SATA and too many USB 2.0 ports, and works with standard SO-DIMM PC3200 memory, which can be found with pretty tight timings - the next wave of laptops should be pretty darn sweet.

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