AMD Adds Dual-Core To Mobile PC Platform

AMD plans on Wednesday to introduce its next-generation dual-core Turion mobile processor, designed to compete with Intel's successful Centrino platform.

"This is the biggest launch for the mobile division this year," says Matt Mazzantini, division marketing manager for AMD's mobile division. "Our share has been steadily growing, and we have doubled our number of design wins since we first introduced Turion."

According to Gartner, AMD's share of the mobile x86 processor market has grown from 8% in third quarter of 2005, shortly after AMD introduced the first Turion platform, to more than 12% in the fourth quarter of 2005.

With its highly successful ad campaign, however, Intel has been able to make Centrino virtually synonymous with mobile computing, particularly in consumer markets. And when Intel launched its Napa platform for Centrino in the first quarter of this year, it was able to beat AMD to market with a dual-core offering. Intel will again bolster its Centrino platform this summer when it introduces a new version based on its new Core Duo 2 processor that the company says will provide a 20% performance over the existing Core Duo based systems while maintaining the same power level.

The new Turion 64 X2 processors will include a dual-channel DDR2 memory controller, a new socket infrastructure, dynamic thermal management, multi-core power management, and AMD's virtualization technology.In addition, AMD is introducing a 64-bit version of its low-cost Sempron mobile processor.

AMD is also collaborating with ATI Technologies and NVIDIA to provide a complete reference design for a mobile PC platform.

Equipment manufactures currently scheduled to utilize the new Turion 64 X2 processor include Acer, BenQ, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Packard Bell, Sotec, and TonFang.

The Turion 64 X2 announcement comes a day after AMD introduced a new line of energy-efficient Athlon and Sempron processors for the desktop market which the company says can improve performance-per-watt by 37% to 154% compared to its existing desktop processors.