AMD believes Puma will roar

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Following today's launch of its Puma notebook platform today, AMD is being bullish about the impact it believes it can have in the mobile computer space.

Ian McNaughton, head of product and platform marketing for EMEA, told IT PRO that Puma has what it takes to compete with Intel's dominant Centrino platform.

"Puma is going to give you a desktop experience on your notebook. It will be, hands down, a different experience. That's not marketing spin, it's true. It's game changing. We've tested it, put it through its paces and what's more, it's going to be priced competitively."

McNaughton said that the strength of Puma stems from AMD's ability to leverage its expertise in chipsets, CPUs and graphics. "We're in a unique position to deliver because we have all of them. We can connect the pieces of silicon on the platform: the graphics, the CPU, the chipset."

AMD purchased graphics chipmaker ATI in 2006 in a deal worth $5.4 billion (£2.76 billion).

McNaughton highlighted the graphical abilities of the platform, which thanks to the 780G core offers UVD, parts of its AVIVO platform for smooth playback of HD content, hybrid graphics, and graphics switching without rebooting.

Hybrid graphics refers to the ability to use both the integrated and discrete graphics chips on the 780G platform together for increased performance, a technology ATI refers to as Hybrid CrossFire X.

Alternatively, users will be able to choose between using just the integrated graphics for increased battery life, or just the discrete chip, for increased performance, and switch between them on the fly.

Other power saving tricks include Dynamic Core, which will turn off one of the CPU cores when it's not required, and shutting down parts of the HyperTransport links when I/O bandwidth is not needed.

One component aspect that AMD does not manufacture itself is the wireless chip, instead looking to third party suppliers from Atheros, Marvell and Broadcom.

McNaughton highlighted this as strength of the platform stating that it offered greater performance and range to that of the current Centrino platform, with its tests suggesting a 38 per cent increase in file transfer speed over the wireless part integrated into Intel's Santa Rosa based notebooks.

For the business market, McNaughton said, "Puma is a great choice for the SMB market. We have promised a stable image for three years, we have Dashboard 1.1 compatiblity and great remote manageability tools."

McNaughton said the AMD was confident its technology would help it increase its moble market share. "We already has twice the design wins that we did for its Turion 64 X2 launch. We're confident of success."

Rival Intel's Montevina platform was expected to have launched by now, but has so far yet to appear, though reports suggest it could appear in July.

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