AMD Phenom II for Mobile Computers Supposedly Coming in May

AMD doesn't currently have a mobile chip offer large and strong enough to really compete with Intel's processors aimed at mobile platforms. However, given the impressive popularity surge of mobile devices over the past year, most notably of netbooks, AMD now seems to be planning its own next-generation mobile computing platform and CPUs and reportedly hopes to launch them by May 2010.

The future processors from Advanced Micro Devices will be based on the 45nm manufacturing process and will support not only DDR3 but also DDR3L memory for reduced power consumption.

The chips, powered by the K10 micro-architecture, won't exactly boast breakthrough-level speeds, with triple and quad-core CPU clocks ranging between 1.60GHz and 2.30GHz, and the clocks of dual-core chips ranging between 2.30GHz and 3.10GHz.This means that AMD laptops in general will be somewhat more powerful, even though they won't exactly be among the best. Still, among the upcoming chips is the AMD Phenom II Black Edition, which will feature the 128-bit floating point unit and will likely support overclocking.

The chip maker also plans to release a platform aimed to work with its new chips. It will be known as the Danube and will be based on the Tigris core-logic set. Among the features it will retain from its predecessor is the built-in ATI Radeon 4200 series graphics with DirectX 10.1 capabilities. AMD reportedly doesn't plan to release Danube without integrated graphics, even though using discrete graphics controllers alongside it will still be possible.

The Danube will feature a new I/O controller, which will provide fourteen USB 2.0 ports and two USB 1.1 ports, as well as six RAID-supporting Serial ATA-600 ports, advanced clock generator and Gigabit Ethernet, among other things. It is unclear why Danube will not come without integrated graphics, although it is possible that said integrated controller may be required for general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing.

The upcoming K10-based chips from AMD will be built on the 45NM process and will operate on 25W, 35W or 45W. Among them are the quad-core Phenom II X920 (1.60GHz), Phenom II N930 (2.0GHz) and Phenom II 920 Black Edition (2.30Ghz), the triple-core Phenom II P820 (1.80GHz) and Phenom II N830 (2.10GHz), as well as seven dual-core chips. Besides the Phenom II X620 BE (3.10GHz) and the Phenom II N620 (2.80GHz), the dual-core list also shows Turion II N530 (2.50Ghz) and Turion P520 (2.30GHz) processors. The list also mentions the Athlon II N330 (2.30GHz) and Athlon P320 (2.10GHz) and even a single-core AMD V-Series (2.20GHz).

Aside from the Athlon and V-series chips (which have an FPU of 64 bits), all processors have a 128-bit FPU. The quad-core and dual-core Phenom processors, as well as the Phenom II N830 triple-core support memory frequencies of 1333MHz (the rest only handle 1066MHz at most). Also, the quad-core and dual-core Phenom processors, plus the Turion II N530 have 2MB of cache memory, with the triple-core chips boasting 1.5MB. The Turion P520 has 5MB cache, while the Athlon chips only have 1MB and the v-series only 512KB.

The information was supposedly received by X-BitLabs from a source “familiar with the company's plans,” although AMD has yet to officially comment on the story.