Santa Rosa, beware! The AMD competition comes along!

Jan 8, 2008 13:29 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Devices announced that their new mobile processor platform codenamed "Puma" will start mass-production in the second quarter of the year, with Puma notebooks to emerge at a short interval.

The announcement tries to focus the market's interest towards the company's products and at the same time, to make up for the poor performance during the last year. The new notebook platform is alleged to boost the notebook's performance while keeping the power requirements at a minimum.

Puma is intended to be AMD's response to Intel's Santa Rosa mobile platform. Puma will feature the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series of discrete graphics chips built with the 55-nanometer technology, as well as AMD's Turion Ultra notebook processor and the AMD RS780 chipset.

The new series of graphics chips includes the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 and the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3600, that have been unveiled yesterday during the Consumer Electronics Show.

"ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series from AMD showcases our technology leadership by delivering customers the most feature-rich family of notebook graphics solutions we've ever produced," said Matt Skynner, vice president of AMD's Graphics Products Group. "These new mobile graphics give leading notebook manufacturers like Asus the ability to create solutions with outstanding new features including next-generation quality, yet battery-efficient, visual experiences in notebooks."

According to AMD, the Puma platform is focused on preserving the battery life through multiple power management improvements, as well as through low average energy use. The platform has been announced as Intel was unveiling its series of 16 45-nanometer processors in the Penryn family. All the chips are environmental friendly and use the high-k/metal gate transistor technology.