AMD Unveils Turion 64 Mobile Technology: A Rebranded Mobile Athlon 64
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 10, 2005 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Intel’s Centrino brand has developed extremely well since its introduction less than two years ago. You could go as far as to say that Centrino has been Intel’s quickest zero-to-success brand that we’ve ever seen in the history of the company. A very large part of the success is due to the strong technology behind Centrino.
AMD doesn’t have the resources of Intel, that’s plain and simple. They have done an excellent job with their K8 architecture, but for AMD to devote additional resources to developing another architecture, strictly mobile oriented, it’s just not possible at this time. At the same time, AMD’s Athlon 64 is far more suited for mobile environments than Intel’s Pentium 4 ever was, so the need for a mobile specific architecture isn’t as great for AMD as it was for Intel. So when AMD announced their Turion 64 “Mobile Technology” we had a feeling it would be something very similar to their desktop Athlon 64s, today AMD confirmed that.
Much like Intel’s Centrino, AMD is referring to their Turion 64 as a “Mobile Technology” and not just a microprocessor platform. AMD has seen the success of Intel’s Centrino Mobile Technology and is hoping to capitalize on some of that success. Unlike Centrino however, Turion 64 doesn’t rely on AMD-supplied chips to receive the branding. AMD will provide the Turion 64 processors, but chipsets can be provided by a number of vendors as can the LAN and wireless controllers. AMD is far less restricting on the components that make up Turion 64 enabled notebooks, which means that they will inevitably be cheaper than Centrino platforms, but it also means that they may not be as power efficient as Centrino platforms - it’s a tradeoff that AMD honestly had to make, as they are far from being in Intel’s position.
The Turion 64 processor is basically a 90nm mobile Athlon 64, so all of the architectural features of the Athlon 64 make their way to the Turion 64. One advantage that the Turion 64 has is that with an on-die memory controller, AMD can potentially offer lower memory controller power consumption than Intel.
The Turion 64 is based on the latest revision E4 of the K8 core, meaning that it supports SSE3 instructions as well as lower power states. The Turion 64 line also supports AMD’s PowerNow technology (known as Cool’N’Quiet on the desktop), which allows for clock speed (and voltage) modulation between 1.0GHz and the processor’s maximum frequency based on load.
The Turion 64 will be available in both 1MB L2 and 512KB L2 cache models, but both models will only support a 64-bit (single channel) DDR400 memory controller. The first Turion 64s will be available in speeds ranging from 1.6GHz up to 2.0GHz.
With the Turion 64 AMD is introducing a new model numbering system to help differentiate various Turion CPUs from one another (and to separate the Turion 64 line from the Athlon 64 line):
As the chart above shows, currently AMD has two Turion lines - a 35W TDP and a 25W TDP line (note that Intel’s Pentium M 755 has a 22W TDP but they are measured differently from AMD). The second letter in the model number indicates the level of power consumption of the processor, with “higher” letters denoting lower power consumption (e.g. MT-34 has lower power consumption than the ML-34). AMD is clearly doing a bit of chip binning, with chips capable of running at lower voltages (and thus lower power) being set aside for the Turion 64 line. This isn’t much of a surprise as they do a similar thing on the server side to create their low power Opteron HE and EE chips (50W and 30W respectively).
The two digits, as usual, indicate clock speed/cache size and other performance impacting features.
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Montrey - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
#8, I was wondering the same thing. I love the mobile 2600+ in my desktop, would be interested in seeing how high you can overvolt/overclock one of these. Anyone know what voltage they're running at to put out 35 watts at 2ghz?raskren - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
Wow. If Intel had taken a binned, low-voltage P4 and slapped a Centrino sticker on it, everyone here would be bashing to no end. Guess what, AMD just did it.Doubtful that these will outperform the latest Pentium M chips if they truly are lower speed, lower voltage K8 chips.
filterxg - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
#8 I don't think you'll ever see a miniITX NF4 board. NF4 (I think) can't go any smaller than full ATX, certainly can't go smaller than microATX. If you want miniITX for an AMD platform, VIA is really the only hope.xsilver - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
will there actually be MA - MZ type processors? bundled with the 4 different initial clock speeds?..... wow -- talk about a huge number of products! how will pricing work?and there will be an obvious shortage of the lowest power spec and cheapest versions....
if its desktop socket compatible, should be a nice sucessor to the mobile xp cpus...
nserra - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
I hope that these Turion based platforms will succeed. WHY?Centrino is excellent! But its monopolist, you can only get the complete centrino package from ONE manufacture, so they all have the same specs, price, performance, features... which is bad, i think.
I hope that they (amd and the others) will do fine, no doubt that the K8 is a superb design, it fills all needs in all markets, and very well.
alangeering - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
Sorry, may have missed it in the article, what socket will thie chip use? Will it be compatible with any desktop sockets (754/939/etc.)?If it were then we could see it heading for a fast introduction to the HTPC market.
I'm still waiting for a nice s939 NF4 miniITX design to come along.
For now the best power/performance miniITX MBord is based on the Pentuim M.
bersl2 - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
While I don't see it ever happening, #6, that would be awesome. As is, it's frickin' impossible to fix laptops. They make it so damn hard to disassemble. Also, I would hope that they wouldn't do stupid things with the design, such as putting a right-angled plug in the back, so that when you actually put the thing in your lap, it puts stress on the component that interfaces the plug and the motherboard, making the thing eventually come loose. Thanks, Compaq!And while I'm complaining: could laptop makers *please* start using Intel's ASL compiler for their ACPI DSDT tables? Microsoft's is nowhere near as strict and allows bugs through. OK thanks!
DigitalDivine - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
As long as these babies have a decent videocard bundled... i will get them.nothing below a 9600 mobility.
god... i want an open standard for laptops so i can build my own.
Ardan - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
I like AMD's track record, and the low heat that my 90nm overclocked Athlon 64 produces. I think this is going to be just what the doctor ordered as well and I can't wait to see a full review of it. Not benchmarks-wise, but the package as a whole. I sure liked Centrino notebooks, but I think I might prefer these because of the flexibility actually.joeld - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link
waiting for the arima W622 w/ x700 to roll out...