AMD Goes for Centrino's Neck, Unveils the Puma Platform - Rest assured, the Puma is fully functional

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Advanced Micro Devices paper-launched its Puma platform during yesterday's conference at the CeBit show in Hanover, Germany. The company's third-generation mobile platform is built around the RS780M chipset and the Griffin low-voltage processor.

The first rumors about the company's new mobile platform emerged last April, and included information about the Griffin CPU, along with the RS780M chipset. This is the chip
manufacturer's first attempt at creating a truly mobile platform, with nailed specifications. Until now, AMD's mobile platforms were flexible and would include a multiple options for its hardware requirements.

A mobile platform gets the "Puma" branding if it complies to some strict requirements, such as Griffin CPU, RS780M chipset and Wi-Fi adapter. The last component – a discrete graphics card – is currently optional and won't affect the final branding. There is a slight difference between Intel's Centrino requirements and those of Puma: Intel would require a Core 2 processor, GM965/PM965 chipset and an Intel wireless adapter, while AMD does not specify the nature of the wireless chip.

The Griffin CPU is commercially known as the Turion Ultra, and is available in dual-core version only. A quad-core counterpart is also possible to appear later on, but it is not included in AMD's current roadmap, as far as it has been disclosed. The chip packs 1MB of L2 cache per core and comes with support for DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 SO-DIMM memory. The CPU is using AMD's refurbished HyperTransport 3.0 interconnect.

Since it is a mobile processor, power efficiency is a critical aspect of the platform, and the Griffin processor can work on three different power planes that are assigned to the northbridge and to each of the cores, respectively. Moreover, each of the CPU's cores can run at its independent frequency, that can dynamically shift frequency levels while executing a thread.

The RS780M chipset comes with built-in support for Direct X 10 graphics, that is four to five times faster than Intel’s X3100 integrated graphics processor. It also features integrated support for HDMI and HDCP via the Universal Video Decoder.

A Puma-powered notebook was showcased yesterday at the conference, thus putting an end to the rumors regarding the technical difficulties the project might be facing. Recently, analyst Doug Freeman claimed that the platform might be crippled by several bugs and system manufacturers are looking for an alternative to it.

When the platform finally hits the market, the notebooks it powers cost between $699 to $2,500. They are expected to kick in starting with the end of the second quarter.