Yesterday Lenovo announced a slew of new laptops and desktops, some of which use the new family of mobile processors from AMD. Today AMD has shared some more details around those processors, including some rather impressive specs.

You can view the full marketing slides over at Engadget, but right off the bat I noticed that they have 25W versions of every processors from the entry-level V Series to the Phenom II Quad Core. A 25W 1.6GHz quad-core is pretty impressive, although the N620 2.8GHz 35W dual core is probably the best combination of performance and power usage for most users.

On the “ultrathin” side of things, aka CULV, AMD is sporting some competitive numbers, if not outright impressive. The single-core V105 runs at 1.2GHz and sports a 9W TDP. I can’t help but expect this chip’s performance to be comparable with Atom, but have twice the (max) power consumption.

For the higher end CULV notebooks, you can get several dual-core chips rated at 15W and up to 1.7GHz. That’s not too shabby at all.

While these specs are certainly enticing, real world battery life tests will show how these chips do with “part-throttle” power consumption. The other factor will be cost; while the laptops with the prior generation AMD processors sold for a nice discount below their Intel counterparts, I would expect pricing of the new chips to step up a bit.

Source: [Engadget]

It’s no secret that AMD has been taking a beating from Intel for the past several years, but a new report shows promise for AMD on the mobile side. Anonymous sources within AMD have been quoted as saying that AMD processors will be found in 109 different laptops in time for the important “back to school” season.

This news comes shortly after several reports of new mobile processors waiting in the wings from AMD. Xbit Labs has details on mobile versions of AMD’s newest Phenom II processors, albeit published back in December 09, to be available in dual, triple and quad core versions. There will also be revised Athlon II and Turion II chips, as well as a lower-end single-core “V-Series” chip. These models will range from 25-45W TDP, with dual-core clock speeds reaching 3.1GHz and quad cores getting up to 2.3GHz.

Fudzilla brought the spotlight back on these yet-unseen chips via product listings from Dell and Acer. Not only did these listings unofficially confirm the existence of the new mobile chips, but the prices for the quad-core systems indicate a significant price undercut against Intel’s quad-core chips.

Netbooked.net has a guest blog post talking about a new mobile processor platform from AMD, intended to compete with the likes of Intel’s Atom. The “Bobcat” processor core is reported to be designed for 1-10 watt power envelopes, with the wide range allowing for a variety of implementations. The low-end versions would be for embedded systems like smartphones, while the higher power models could power your next netbook.

This new platform is also designed to allow for the use of multiple Bobcat cores, which could be combined with a GPU core into the Ontario system-on-a-chip. Much like the new Intel chip designs, the CPU and GPU cores would be combined on the same chip for power and design complexity reduction.

Doctor, we have a pulse!

It is good to see signs of life from AMD. Intel really took the lead with Core Duo and while AMD’s desktop & server products have been competitive, their mobile product line has been practically flatline for years.

While the TDP ratings for these new mobile Phenoms look good, TDP only tells part of the story. They will need to optimize their idle power consumption and maximize the system’s ability to drop out of high power states, to save every milliwatt possible when part of the system isn’t being used.

Sources: [Reuters], [Xbit Labs], [Fuzilla], [Netbooked.net]

Gateway NV52 and NV58 notebooks - from Anandtech.com

The folks over at Anandtech took two identical notebooks, save for the opposing Intel and AMD CPU’s, and gave their batteries a pounding. Guess who won?

Win might be a little misleading. Among several different battery tests, covering the spread from idle to DVD playback, runtime on the Intel system surpassed the AMD version by 20-35%. Keep in mind these notebooks are identical save for the CPU and chipset, being Gateway models NV58 (Intel) and NV52 (AMD). While this article didn’t test performance, it has been well established that the Core 2 Duo lineup is leaps and bounds faster than any mobile chip from AMD.

While the Turion 64 X2 should be a bit less power hungry than the Athlon 64 X2 tested here, performance will drop even more and it still won’t make up the 28% average difference in runtime. As I said on my soapbox last week, AMD doesn’t need a netbook CPU. It needs a mobile CPU to compete in the notebook space in the first place. While in this instance the AMD-based Gateway notebook is $80 cheaper, that alone isn’t enough to keep them in the game. It doesn’t help that several PC manufacturers don’t even offer AMD-based notebooks.

Source: [Anandtech]