Event Coverage

Computex 2008 - Part 8

By Vijay Anand - 6 Jun 2008

AMD's Puma Notebook Platform Launched

AMD's Puma Notebook Platform Launched

AMD pulled together a pretty big launch for its Puma Notebooks - a platform refresh with a new CPU, chipset, vastly better IGP and a new wireless support standard.

But just before the big curtain was unveiled, they spiced the launch up with a traditional Taiwanese dance.

The launch was so pivotal that Dirk Meyer, AMD's President and Chief Operating Officer himself was present to give us an update of how AMD is progressing.

This is the new Turion X2 Ultra (Griffen) mobile processor for the Puma platform. All the enhancements are taken directly out of the Phenom, but this CPU uses just two cores and foregoes the L3 cache since there are only dual cores. More info over here.

Chris Cloran, AMD's Corporate VP and GM of Computing Solutions Group (Notebook Division), was heading the Puma launch and in this slide, compares video quality performance of the new IGP versus that of Intel's current GM965 class. Of course this comparison will change shortly as Intel's Centrino 2 platform takes off in a couple of months.

The new AMD M780G chipset is the heart of the Puma platform and its IGP has been upgraded to the Radeon HD 3200 graphics engine, which is able to tackle all high definition video tasks like Blu-ray movies and has rather decent 3DMark06 results that translates to playable casual gaming. This slide from AMD compares itself against Intel's GM965 class again.

The IGP in the AMD M780G is powerful enough that AMD decided to showoff its capabilities in this little demo where a dynamic video wallpaper is enabled, while running a HD video, and running a game of HD resolution - and it's able to cope.

The Puma platform also supports PowerXpress technology to allow switching between IGP graphics and discrete graphics for power savings or full 3D performance. This of course only works with an all AMD platform - AMD chipset and AMD/ATI graphics; you can't pull this off by pairing a discrete NVIDIA graphics on the Puma platform.

And when combining the Puma platform with an AMD/ATI discrete graphics, the chipset also supports Hybrid CrossFire to boost performance even further with the IGP and discrete graphics working hand-in-hand.

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