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."

AMD launches 64-bit Turion processor for notebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Low Power? Better Link

[ackthpt]

Looks like we should be seeing some nice low-powered 64-bit notebooks in the near future."

First, why such a lame link for this post? Here's a more informative one [eweek.com] Editors, sheesh!

Ok, let's look at this without the rose coloured glasses:

64 bit CPUs

25 - 35 watts (peak)

Better get used to lugging a massive battery if you plan to really get the most out of that 64 bit CPU. Honestly, why else would you have a laptop with such a race horse in it if you weren't going to be using it to its capacity? Ok, maybe you're one of the few who run a fully 64 bit OS (probly Linux) with fully 64 bit apps (did yer own builds targeted at AMD64 instructions) and you really need the full addressing, but won't be using all the ponies. Odds are, you'll be an early adopter for somewhat nebulous reasons. Cool, but not essential

Re:Question

[mabinogi]

mine currently has 2GB, and it was purchased last year.....

so > 4G won't be all that far away.

But apart from that, there's more advantages to Athlon64 than the AMD64 instructions (which you're not going to be able to take advantage of right now anyway unless you're running Linux).

Hmm just now released

[OverlordQ]

I swear they started back in January [slashdot.org]

Re:Question

[bersl2]

There are other advantages, namely the additions to the x86 ISA that fix some of its shortcomings. There are 8 more general-purpose registers and 8 more SIMD registers.

Re:What I'm interested in...

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

DFI and AOpen both make boards. See http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/dfi-855gm e-mgf/index.x?pg=1 [techreport.com] and http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1728546 ,00.asp [extremetech.com] for reviews of each.

Re:Availability

[UserChrisCanter4]

HP/Compaq sell AMD-based notebooks. Gateway/eMachines sell AMD-based notebooks. Fujitsu sells AMD-based notebooks. Sony has sold AMD-based notebooks, although I can't speak about their current line-up. All four of these comapnies have their products available in large consumer electronics stores such as Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc.

In fact, the only big-name companies who don't seem to offer AMD notebooks are Dell (obviously), Toshiba, and IBM. Toshiba's the only one of that group that even sells through retail channels anymore.

Where do you live?

Re:price points

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at Pentium M prices?

http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/pricelist/ [intel.com]

Re:Question

[Bloater]

As bersl points out, there are other advantages. But I'd like to correct a common misconception - the 32 bit PC chips from (I think) Pentium pro onward from intel, and some time later from the other pc chip manufacturers, support much more than 4GB even though they only support 32 bit addresses in the CPU registers. 32 bits limit any given process on an OS such as Linux or Windows to 4GB of addresses at any one time. Although how much of that can be mapped to real storage is OS and OS version dependent. The AMD 64 initialy provides a virtual memory address space of 2^18 GB, but that is not directly related to the amount of physical memory that can be operated by an OS. apparently that 2^18 (262144) GB may be extended to 2^34 (17179869184) GB in later models.

Re:So that means...

[klevin]

The vast majority of sperm killed by using a laptop on your lap are because the the heat buildup caused by sitting with your legs pressed together (something like 75% of the increase in temp). The laptop contributes relativley little to the heat buildup.

Any guy who routinely sits with his legs pressed together (as opposed to the common, more relaxed posture) runs a higher risk of infertility/low sperm count.

Re:1MB max of L2 cache - suckage

[ChronosJB]

Umm...the performance benefit of that 2MB L2 cashe is not that much better than 1MB. It is maybe a 3-7% increase in performance. Granted that is Intel vs. Intel not Intel vs. AMD since AMD just released this CPU. AMD CPUs have usually shown better efficiency when it has come down to computation power with 512kb and 1MB L2 cashe and Intel has had troubles even with 2MB L2 cashe due to the memory controler being on the motherboard and not on the CPU.

If AMD were to up their L2 cashe to 2MB or higher, the performance gain would probably be about the same as Intel's, 3-7% increase per 1MB increase.

We will see who the real mobile CPU winner is once we get some benchmarks to compare, but until then we are all speculating as to which CPU is better.

Re:1MB max of L2 cache - suckage

[Tarqwak]

2 MB L2 cache doesn't do much by itself, give that Dothan core a 533 MHz FSB instead of the 400 MHz Banias was on and it starts to shine (and of course the power consumption goes up too). Speaking of which, AMD Turion 64 (and Athlon 64) have memory controller in the core not in north bridge like Intel processors, so that 25/35W CPU power envelope includes MC overhead too.

BTW, most 512 kB L2 Athlon 64 CPUs run circles over P4 3.6+ GHz with 2 MB cache in gaming benches, so cache alone means squat ;)

And it looks like it's going to be two years [ixbt.com] until Pentium M range gets 64-bit core. AMD Turion 64 already has 16/16 INT/XMM registers, SSE/SSE2/SSE3 support etc.

Re:Question

[andreyw]

Incorrect. Please read the Intel docs, specifically the sections on PSE/PAE, which both have been avaiable since the Pentium Pro. The virtual addressable space will still be 4GB, however the 36-bit address bus will allow for a theoretical limit of 64GB.

Re:What I'm interested in...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"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?"

If it's socket-compatible (as are most AMD mobile CPUs), you'll be able to use it in desktop motherboards.

Regardless, you can already undervolt a A64 Winchester significantly. Mine runs at 1800MHz / 1.1V @ ~ 23W.

I have a Zalman CNPS7000AlCU thermally controlled by my BIOS, and the fan doesn't even turn on unless I fully load the CPU for several minutes. The CPU idles at 42C with the fan off (of course, this is at 800MHz / 0.8V).

Re:Question

[bluGill]

The 80386 supported more than 4GB of memory. I don't think anyone actually built a motherboard that could take that much memory, but it could in theory deal with it. You just had to use the same ugly segmented memory model that everyone hated about the 286 while in 32 bit mode. Everyone just set their segment to 0, since that still allowed 4GB of ram, and nobody with a 80386 had that much memory.

Turion= 2 chips in 1

[beesquee]

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.

Re:Pentium M boards and Turion Chipsets

[sagekoala06]

they use 754 http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_12651_12658,00.html [amd.com]

Answer

[turgid]

The virtual addressable space will still be 4GB, however the 36-bit address bus will allow for a theoretical limit of 64GB.

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 [cpu-world.com]. 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...

Re:Question

[Tarqwak]

To be fair, Transmeta Efficeon [transmeta.com] range has integrated DDR memory controller too. It's not a true x86 CPU but it can morph x86 instructions into VLIW ones.

It's a shame that it hasn't been too successful :/