Published in PC Hardware

AMD's mobile roadmap revealed

by on12 March 2008
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No quad-core in sight

German Website ComputerBase has got it hands on AMD's mobile roadmap for the next year or so and it doesn't hold any surprises for this year, at least. There's no mention of any quad-core mobile parts at all, and according to the site, the fastest processor until Q4 this year will be the Turion 64 Ultra ZM-86 with a clock speed of 2.4GHz.

Saying that, AMD seems to have manged to design fairly cool running mobile parts even at 65nm, as the ZM-86 only has a TDP of 35W, which should make it quite easy to cool. The slower parts have a TDP of either 31 or 32W depending on model, with the 2MB L2 cache versions having the higher TDP. The 1MB L2 cache models will go under the Turion 64 brand and use the RM suffix instead of ZM for the Ultra models.

AMD also have some cheaper single core mobile Athlon 64, but sadly these have a TDP of 35W. For the budget market we're looking at mobile Semprons, but at least these processors have a lower TDP of 25W. The mobile Athlong 64s will come with 1MB of cache, while the Semprons will only have 512kB.

The new Turion 64 mobile processors will support DDR2-800 memory, while the other processors are stuck with 667MHz memory. The HyperTransport bus speed will also differ between the models, with the Turion 64 Ultra getting a whopping 4.4GHz bus, the Turion 64 will be using a slighty slower bus at 4GHz, while the Athlon 64s and Semprons will use a 3.6GHz bus.

The mobile Turion processors will also support a dynamic HyperTransport bus, and as such they can throttle back much more than the other two processors. They also have more power states and better standby power down modes than the lower priced processors. All models are using HyperTransport 3.0 and a new S1g2 packaging.

By 2009 AMD will switch over to a new core codenamed Black Swift, which is part of the Stars core that we've written about before. These processors will be manufactured at 45nm, have a new FS1 packaging and use DDR3 memory. The single core processors will use the White Swift code name and will only be targeting the current Sempron space. Both the single and dual-core 45nm parts will have integrated graphics, also known as Fusion, but time will tell how this pans out.

You can find some more information here
Last modified on 12 March 2008
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