AMD To Spoil Santa Rosa Launch?

by Chad Weirick — Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:00 PM EDT

Over the past few years, AMD has moved from making value chips to having a pair of serious runs as the performance king in the desktop arena and finally making serious inroads into the server market. The only market where AMD was not able to move beyond their beachhead was in the Intel-dominated land of laptops. Unfortunately for AMD, laptops are a big seller these days.

Current AMD mobile flagship product, the Turion X2, just doesn't catch the offerings from rival Intel in either performance or battery life. AMD has been working hard to close this gap, and it seems that the first big step will be ready at almost the same time Intel is ready to ship their next generation laptop platform.

"This May, Intel's Centrino platform will enter its fourth revision with Santa Rosa. Late last year AMD launched the Kite platform -- 90nm dual-core Turion processors, DDR2-667 and 802.11g wireless. Kite will undergo a refresh at about the same time as the Intel Santa Rosa platform launch. The spearhead of this new initiative is the Hawk-family of mobile CPUs. The first of these new Turion CPUs, dubbed Tyler, is a 65nm SOI DDR2-800 processor that utilizes Socket S1. Essentially, this processor is Brisbane for the notebook, and does not incorporate any of the new features of the K10/Greyhound architecture. Following Tyler, a low cost 65nm SOI revision dubbed Sherman will replace the 90nm Mobile Sempron cores."

Will AMD attempt to gain market- and mind-share by announcing their advancements just prior to Intel making the announcement that their Santa Rosa is shipping? What do you think?

Tags: AMD, SAN, Oil, launch, Santa, OS, AM

AMD To Spoil Santa Rosa Launch?

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