AMD's Puma Mobile Platform is a Powerhog

Advanced Micro Devices seems to be facing some critical issues with the upcoming Puma mobile platform, slated to arrive in mid-2008. Rumors about some design flaws in the platform started to show up in early February, when tech analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research went public with a statement.

''Our channel checks suggest AMD's Puma platform for notebooks may have a technical glitch. We have not been able to confirm this with AMD and if a problem exists, AMD could have a fix in the works that saves the launch,'' said Freedman back them.

Recent reports emerging from AMD's manufacturing partners in Taiwan confirm that there are some issues with both the Griffin CPU and the rest of the platform. The Puma platform is built from scratch with mobility in mind, and is intended to be a direct competitor to Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 platform. However, the Puma platform could turn bad for its manufacturer.

According to the reports published by tech website TGDaily, one of the most important issues affecting the platform is related to power management and energy efficiency. The success of a mobile platform on the market is proportional with its power management capabilities, and that's what Puma lacks.

T might be true that the Griffin CPU has been built from scratch to be more energy-efficient, but AMD messed up, and created a chip version that actually draws much more power than any of the Turion64-based models.

Moving along to the chipset, we find out that the mobile version of the 780 chipset (M) is not quite different from the desktop design, as it will be comprised of the RS780M northbridge and SB700 southbridge chips.

Back in September 2007, when the platform was first announced, AMD said that it would be a completely new architecture, with revolutionary technology. Instead of that, AMD designed a Griffin chip born from an unholy union between the K8 and K10 architectures, with obsolete processing cores and less optimization features.

More than that, the chip's computing capabilities won't even scratch Intel's Core 2 Duo series. The only strong point in the platform is the 3D graphics processing capabilities provided by the RS780M northbridge chip. It seems that Puma will have a tough ride on the market provided that it manages to show up.