X-bit labs

News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 7)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/14/2004 | 08:04 AM ]

AMD Aims at Centrino’s Laurel Wreath

The trend for low power consuming notebooks with loads of capabilities continues to gather momentum. Customers want to have powerful computers that can play and record DVDs, run computer games and surf the Internet via WLAN networks, but still maintain long battery operation. In order to achieve all such goals, notebook makers have to utilize components with low power consumption, primarily use economical central processing units, hard disk drives and graphics processors.

Last year Intel did what practically revolutionized the market of mobile PCs – it introduced a platform that is fast, reliable and consumes low amount of energy because of using specially-developed microprocessor, which highest TDP is in the range of 25W.

AMD’s positions on the market of mobile products have not been strong historically, but with the introduction of Centrino the company faced even stronger competition from its main rival. All AMD could do is accept the challenge and roll-out powerful processors with extremely low power-consumption. In the Q1 2004 the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker already introduced its Mobile Athlon 64 with 35W TDP, but it looks like the company plans chips with 25W thermal design power in the second half of this year.

AMD's mobile roadmap. Please click to enlarge

“A strong side of Intel Centrino is that this is an all-in-one platform for notebook makers: a central processing unit, a core-logic possibly with integrated graphics and a WLAN module. With AMD everything is much more complex for laptop builders: Advanced Micro Devices supplies only microprocessors (even though pretty good one), while notebook designers have to acquire additional components from certain third-party vendors, which is not that comfortable. However, 64-bit capability may push customers and notebook designers to pay more attention to AMD’s chips. Nevertheless, there is always a question about necessity for 64-bit computing – something that has been available on servers historically – on the run,” said X-bit labs’ platform analyst Ilya Gavrichenkov.