AMD's Mobile Processor, The Griffin

As the mobile computing market increases and demands more power and new technologies, AMD decided to revamp its platform aimed at laptops and notebooks. The Griffin core based processor is the replacement for the current mobile solutions offered by AMD: the Turion, the Athlon and the Sempron mobile processors.

Unlike the desktop and server segments, that will soon receive a brand new generation of processors based on a ground breaking architecture, the mobile computing platform will have to make do with fewer changes in the hardware department. According to the news site News.com, that cites an AMD engineer, the next mobile processor from AMD is not too different from already existing mobile designs. Most changes were made in the memory controller department and are concerning power saving technologies, while the programmable cores are almost identical.

The first mobile processors built by AMD, the first generation of Turions, were in fact versions of the Opteron class that received improved energy saving improvements. AMD has a pretty strong foothold on the mobile computing market and the Griffin design is intended as a means to consolidate that foothold, and that without any basic core changes. "Griffin is largely a northbridge project built on an existing processor core design", said Jonathan Owen from AMD. The Northbridge of the Griffin processors presents a radical twist from the traditional design, as AMD integrated the memory controller directly inside the chip, unlike Intel, which followed the more basic design of putting them on the mainboard chipset. Unlike other AMD processors that integrate the memory controller unit, the Griffin will allow the controller to run at the much lower speed of memory, enabling this way some measure of power savings. Another power saving technology built inside the Griffin takes the form of thermal monitors that can throttle the chip speed back and forth according to the temperature and the workload.

Griffin based notebooks and laptops will be available to end users sometimes during the middle of the next year and as the processor is very similar to the current Turion chip, there are estimates that the clock speeds are going to be closely matched.