Toshiba’s First Laptops with New AMD Platform, are Out

Toshiba on Wednesday introduced laptops powered by the new Puma-based processors recently announced by Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD’s new Turion X2 Ultra ZM processors will be included in Toshiba’s new Satellite PCs, which will ship later this year, a Toshiba spokesman said.

The Turion X2 Ultra processor is part of the Puma platform launched by AMD on Tuesday. The processors come in two speeds: the ZM-80 runs at 2.1GHz and comes with 2M bytes of cache, while the Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 runs at 2.4GHz and includes 2M bytes of cache.

Along with the Turion Ultra ZM, Toshiba said two other chips from AMD — Athlon Dual Core QL and Turion Dual Core RM — will be offered in the Satellite P300D, Satellite A300D, Satellite M300D, Satellite U400D, Satellite L300D and Satellite L350D laptops. It wasn’t immediately clear what processors each laptop would come with.

During the Puma launch, AMD said it had won notebook designs for the platform from PC makers including Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Toshiba. About one-third of laptop designs have 15-inch screens, with other models having screen sizes from 12 inches to 18 inches.

Puma laptops are designed to run Windows Vista, AMD has said.

The Puma platform also includes the mobile AMD 7-series chipset and ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series graphics cards. The Puma platform supports hybrid graphics technology, which boosts the platform’s graphics performance by running both the integrated graphics processor and a separate graphics card.