AMD Turion uses different kinds of transistors

CHIP FIRM AMD has gone some way to answering a question quite a few of us have asked for months. Just what is the difference between the notebook Turion chips, Athlon 64s and Opterons.

At a presentation here at Gartner's System Builder Summit, Dave Everitt, European product manager for AMD, said transistors for the Turion are differently binned.

He said: "We've modified the transistors so they are cooler and added an additional C3 state to bring the power levels down. "

He claimed that unlike AMD's competitor, people building systems had a choice of CPU, chipset and wireless products from different vendors so that people could build systems to different specs at different price points.

He said that the Turion option wasn't like the Centrino, which offered any type of notebook as long as it was black.

He also claimed the design of the Turion microprocessor meant that cache wasn't the be all and end all on performance, and showed figures claiming AMD's chip out performed the Pentium M.

A number of vendors are making AMD Turion based notebooks including Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, MSI, Medion, Uniwill, Mitac, Twinhead and Arima. Tulip has made one which looks like a woman's handbag and appears to be covered in zebra skin.