AMD expands mobile lineup with Turion

Lapping up the portable market

22 June 2005 21:34 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

While we're still in transitional times where 32-bit software usage is by no means dead and gone just yet (though the big two chipmakers would love that). AMD needed an intermediate product below its mobile Athlon 64 to cut more friendly price points for light users who still wanted a bit of a kick to their road warrior notebooks.

Enter the dual core, 64-Bit Turion, which carries over PowerNow! for reduced heat and increased battery life and essentially is being touted as able to get near the mobile Athlon's performance. It's also got the antivirus protection of its elder brothers as long as you're on XP SP2 and general Wireless compatability with all current 802.11x generations and Bluetooth

It's by no means so cut down as to be incapable; Acer are planning to pack it into a Ferrari 4000 laptop with all the bells and whistles you may have expected to go with the yellow shield; American specs currently stand at an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics chipset, 15-inch TFT screen, a comparatively whopping 100GB hard drive for storing lots of music, photos and today's modern obese gigabyte-hungry games, as well as a DVD Super Multi dual-layer drive unit for backing up from that big disk or just watching films. Like the last one, it will be costly, just shy of US$2000, so a minimum of £1500 over here even with the great currency exchange.

In spite of Acer's surrounding the chip with luxury parts, other companies are taking advantage of the slim form factor advantage afforded by the power efficiency to go for non-gamers too - though that will depend on the supplied RAM and graphics chipset. As long as neither are crippled for price, anyone should be able to both work and enjoy the occasional game. However, it's just the announcement and launch now - we'll see how the chip fares in the choppy laptop market where the ranges change even more often than on the desktop ramps.

Full tags

Hardware, Desktop PCs, AMD