14 DAY TRIAL // Intel proudly launched its latest Centrino mobile CPU platform codename "Santa Rosa" a week ago and we have been waiting for an AMD response since then. Although everybody's talking about AMD's fall, the company does not show any sign of defeat, as it is prepared to retaliate with their new "Puma" mobile platform and codename "Griffin" CPUs.
The overall characteristics of these two technologies are not something that would impress an IT enthusiast. However, it is interesting to point out that, through these two technologies, AMD shows some palpable achievements towards its Fusion processor line. In addition, the latest developments prove to offer superior levels of power savings for the mobile side.
Codename "Griffin" CPU is specifically designed to power the "Puma" mobile platform. AMD has done a great job in offering power-saving CPUs over the last years. "Griffin" makes no exception, based on the K8 architecture. The CPU is a pure dual core, but also integrates what should be regarded as a "system on chip" (SOC) to some extent. It's actually something close to the GPU-CPU Fusion concept, though without the GPU fully integrated into the CPU chip.
To be more specific, AMD integrated the Northbridge component directly on-die. While we were expecting the memory controller to be integrate on the chip, AMD did not provide any information regarding such development as of yet. Still, AMD mentions that even the HyperTransport 3.0 controller is on-die.
With this new "fused" concept, AMD also introduces separate power planes for the CPU and Northbridge portions of the Griffin processor. This translates into a more power-efficient design, allowing the Puma platform to dynamically scale voltage and frequency of the CPU cores and Northbridge, instead of both being fully scaled at all times during usage. In this sense, AMD claims that the "Griffin" CPU can manage a total halt while still being used by low processing power applications such as slide presentations. In a nutshell, "Griffin" is able to put the two cores to sleep and still move static pixel data from the frame buffer.
"Griffin" and "Puma" represent the first step towards the total fusion between CPU and GPU, which should be achieved in 2009, according to AMD.