Friday, June 20, 2008

AMD's Puma ready to pounce


This time around, AMD is ready with a major product launch on schedule, and is enjoying a bit of good fortune as well.


Notebook makers of all stripes are getting ready to launch systems based on AMD's Puma notebook technology, which consists of a new processor, a mobile chipset, and wireless chips from AMD's partners. The official announcement is expected to come later Wednesday at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, and notebooks with the chips will be arriving over the next several weeks from companies like Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, said Bahr Mahony, director of AMD's mobile business


Assuming those notebooks ship without incident, Puma arrives in far better shape than Barcelona, the quad-core server processor that was a year late after running into major technical glitches. Puma also arrives at a time when Intel has suffered a rare--at least over the last two years--gaffe inside its notebook group: the company's Montevina notebook platform will be delayed several weeks with chipset problems, which could affect Intel's performance during the important back-to-school shopping season.



AMD's new Turion X2 Ultra processor is the first designed-for-mobile processor that AMD has ever produced; the earlier versions of its Turion processor were essentially the same design as its Opteron design with a more power-friendly implementation. But the PC market is shifting dramatically in favor of the notebook over the desktop as mobility becomes all the rage, and Intel has enjoyed a strong position in this market.


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