AMD Develops New Platforms for Ultrabook-Like Laptops

While Intel most certainly gets all the credit for coming up with the Ultrabook concept and marketing it in the notebook market, AMD is by no means going to overlook this sector and in 2012 and 2013 will introduce a series of APUs that are destined to power its own Ultrabook-like laptops.

AMD hopes that in this way it will be able to improve its position in the notebook market, where it currently holds about a 10% share.

According to DigiTimes, the Sunnyvale-based chip maker plans to introduce two platforms for this type of ultra-thin products, the first coming in June of 2012 and going by the name of Deccan, while the latter will be released in 2013 and is known under the code-name of Kerala.

Most of you are already accustomed with Deccan as we detailed this platform in series of previous reports, but I will still go through a quick refresher for those of you that aren't all that familiar with the subject.

Deccan is comprised out of the Wichita-based APUs and of the Yuca FCH, and the former will include up to four processing cores, a built-in graphics core as well as some of the I/O functionality usually found in the FCH controller.

As far as the 2013 Kerala platform is concerned, information is scarce at this point in time, but it will most probably use a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, just as is the case with Wichita.

We also know from previous leaks to reached the Web that the Kabini APU used for this platform will be based on the AMD Jaguar CPU core architecture with support for DDR3 memory.

Both of these platforms will have to go ahead against some strong opposition as it seems that March 2012 will mark the introduction of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors, while in 2013 AMD will have to compete with Haswell.

The two Intel processor architectures will bring an impressive series of improvements to the table, including much lower power consumption, so AMD will really have to step up its game if it wants to make it in the Ultrabook space.