Advanced Micro Devices plans to release its Turion processor for notebooks on Thursday, the first stage in an effort to recover ground lost in laptops in recent years to Intel.
The Turion is essentially an energy-efficient version of AMD's Athlon 64 chips for desktops. Turions generally run at slower speeds than their desktop counterparts and contain dedicated circuitry that allows them to slow themselves dynamically to throttle power consumption.
The chips will be integrated into the "thin and light" notebooks that weigh a few pounds and can run several hours on a single battery charge. Acer, now one of the fastest growing PC makers thanks to its notebook line, will adopt the chip, AMD said, as will Fujitsu-Siemens and others.
In the past few years, AMD has concentrated mostly on the desktop and server market. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has released notebook chips during this time, but they haven't been aggressively optimized for energy conservation. As a result, they mostly ended up in the largish, "desktop replacement" notebooks that can weigh 8 pounds.
_______________
Read More:
c|net
Mar 10, 2005, 07:03 AM
