An AMD model heaving the latest Puma laptop.
(click for larger image)

TAIPEI--Since it started playing in the mobile market, AMD has always been considered second fiddle to Intel, whose Centrino systems have essentially dominated the laptop scene. It hasn't helped that while the latter is already offering 45nm chips, AMD is still stuck with 65nm manufacturing lines.

Instead of playing the number-crunching game, AMD is, instead, leveraging on the graphics technology from ATI. Its latest mobile platform, codenamed Puma, offers a tight integration between the CPU and video chipset for exceptional gaming and multimedia performance. As Dirk Meyer, AMD president and chief operating officer, put it during his keynote at Computex Taipei 2008, "It's not about creating technology for technology sake, but for an immersive experience... The future of computing is visual."

Consisting of the new dual-core AMD Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor (codenamed Griffin) and Series-7 mainboard (M780G and SB700), the most exciting feature must surely be the AMD PowerXpress technology. The mainboard comes with an integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics processor, a DirectX 10-capabilty solution which AMD claims offers 3x the performance of its competitor. But alongside, a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 or HD 3600 graphics card (GPU) can be included. In this case, PowerXpress kicks in to seamlessly switch between the integrated and discrete GPUs, depending on whether battery life or performance is required.

Yet even while the dedicated GPU is in use for tasks like HD video or gaming, the integrated chipset continues to handle less video-intensive needs like Vista's Aero interface, thanks to ATI CrossFireX technology. AMD claims the synergy between integrated and discrete graphics gives a 70 percent boost to graphics performance.

This is one of the reasons that, despite reports of the Griffin chip drawing more power than its predecessors, AMD promises longer unplugged time as the system uses five times less CPU clock cycles for multimedia tasks. All this is nice and dandy on paper, but one of the most challenging issues faced by AMD is that there are comparatively fewer models compared with Centrino systems. However, with the launch of Puma, there are twice as many designs based on the latest AMD chipset compared with the previous Turion X2 chip. We take a look as some of the Puma models present at the Taiwan-based Computex tradeshow.

Acer Aspire 5530

Acer TravelMate 5530

Asus F5Z

Asus M51Ta

Clevo M760JU

Fujitsu Amilo Sa 3650

HP Pavilion tx2000z

HP Pavilion tx2500

MSI GT-735

MSI PR-210

MSI PR-211

Toshiba Commercial notebook