AMD preps fresh batch of Turions

WITH THE UPCOMING launch of Intel's Santa Rosa chipset on May 6th, AMD will reply not with a new chipset, but rather a CPU refresh and more price slashing, this time in the mobile segment.

While the market is waiting for "Bulldozer", which is a codename for AMD's K10 marchitecture refresh for notebooks - AMD is switching Turions over to a 65 nanometre SOI manufacturing process. This move lets AMD offer higher clock CPUs while staying at the same levels of power consumption. Lower-clocked Turions will however, consume less power than they were in the past, so AMD is expecting that a combination new Turions with either AMD 690M chipset or mobile version of Nvidia's upcoming MCP68 chipset will consume less power than competing parts.

To get the sales going, AMD will offer CPU+chipset bundle promotions, which were famous and succesful in Intel's own history, and so Chimpzilla is happily repeating the same scheme, now that the ATI chipset division is a part of AMD.

The refresh features not only clock speed increase or lower power consupmtion combo - integrated memory controller also got refreshed, and now spots desktop-style DDR2-800 support. Refreshed line-up is consisted of five processors, two are 35 Watt models: Turion 64 X2 TL-66, a 2.3 GHz clocked part with 256KB of L1 and 1MB of L2 cache (128KB L1 and 512KB L2 per core) and X2 TL-64 (2.2 GHz). 31W bracket is encompased by TL-56 (1.8 GHz), TL-58 (1.9 GHz) and TL-60 (2.0 GHz).

It remains to be seen whether this will be enough or not. µ