AMD confirms new mobile core

Prices, specs and all the other info is so old news by now it is mildly silly to talk about it. The interesting bits were in the fine print, carefully hidden between the lines. Then he confirmed the new mobile core.

The mobile core is starting to sound much less like a core, and much more like a mobile infrastructure. Henri Richard stood up and said that AMD would do to laptops what it did to servers, before the end of 2008. We have long been saying that it has a new core in the works, but the talk now is it will be a lot more than that, an ecosystem versus a single chip. He also hinted that it would be much more 'open' than the 'competition'.

He also pointed out a great strength of AMD right now, a word called partners. Intel can't seem to understand that this word can be used without the phrase 'cannibalism' in the same sentence, AMD somehow can. This will again bite Intel soon.

The problem is 802.11n, or pre-n, or pre-pre-n as the running joke may go. Turion machines can play with any vendor that has a compatible solution, and skip out on the bad ones. Intel has Centrino, and must rely on the Intel derived chipsets to do the heavy lifting. If past wireless chip introductions are any indication, I would expect AMD to have a year lead on filling the -n checkbox. This matters a lot in retail.

To close things out, he pointed out something that most people don't pay attention to, design teams. For K7 and K8, AMD had one. If it screwed up, it had big problems, plan B included a welfare check (dole checqueueueue for you Brits reading along). Now AMD has two distinct teams, and while there still isn't a plan B as such, it doesn't have to do the old Henry Ford 'you can have any colour you want as long as it's black' thing with cores anymore.

One design team is going to do the server type cores, and the other mobile. An interesting thing is how they will trickle down, server parts will end up in the desktop and mainstream segments, and the mobile parts will trickle down to power efficient desktops.

Overall, the Turion X2 launch was chock full of info, but not much about X2s themselves. Granted, I wasn't there for the whole thing, but the interesting bits, and there were a lot, were all about related events. Not a bad show if I do say so myself. µ