Published in PC Hardware

AMD's upcoming mobile CPU lineup revealed

by on06 May 2010

Image

Phenoms, Turions, Athlons and a touch of spite

We already
talked about AMD's upcoming quad and triple core mobile Phenoms, but our old friend Lars has managed to scoop a few more fresh and succulent parts cooked up at AMD.

It appears that AMD will offer three Phenom II X4 processors in addition to the 2GHz N930. AMD will also launch the P920, a power efficient 1.6GHz rated at a rather modest 25W. On the other side of the specter, AMD will offer the X920 BE, a Black Edition part clocked at 2.3GHz. It sounds impressive, but it's a 45W part, so it will probably be featured in big and mean rigs.

On the tri-core front AMD will introduce another 25W part, the P820. It's clocked at 1.8GHz, so it's 300MHz slower than the 35W Phenom II X3 N830 mentioned yesterday. The company will also launch a couple of dual-core Phenoms. The N620 will end up with a 2.8GHz clock and a 35W TDP. However, the X620 Black Edition will deliver 3.1GHz, but it's TDP is 45W.

AMD will introduce two new Turion II dual-cores as well. The P520 is a 25W CPU clocked at 2.3GHz, but the N530 should end up clocked at 2.5GHz, albeit with a 25W TDP. Both should offer 1MB of L2 cache per core. In order to make things just a tad more complicated, AMD will churn out two Athlon II X2 processors with 512kB of cache per core. The 25W P320 will run at 2.1GHz and the N330 (no relation to Intel's dual-core Atom) will end up at 2.3Ghz with a 35W TDP.

For years AMD has been struggling to catch up with Intel in the mobile segment. While the new parts will stop short of beating the latest Core series parts in terms of performance, they will probably offer much better value for money. However, this time around it seems that AMD has more to offer than just bargain pricing. The Black Edition models look pretty impressive on paper and the 3.1GHz Phenom II X620 Black Edition could become an affordable alternative to Intel's pricey high-end dual-core parts.

It would be nice to see AMD gain some ground in the mobile segment, as Intel has had it pretty much to itself for the past several years and more competition would help spice things up a bit.

More here.
Rate this item
(0 votes)