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.

AMD Intros New Phenom Chips And Triple-Core Processors

Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced new Phenom chips, including quad-core chips and its first triple-core processors for desktop PCs.

The company’s triple-core Phenom X3 8000 series processors provide an option to mainstream PC buyers who don’t want to spend on a quad-core processor but are looking for more performance than a dual-core processor, said Pat Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD.

The chips could be used for high-definition video playback, casual mainstream gaming and productivity applications, Moorhead said.

The company’s first triple-core processors include the Phenom X3 8400, which runs at 2.1GHz, and the Phenom X3 8600, which runs at 2.3GHz. Both will come with 1.5MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

AMD also launched three Phenom quad-core processors on Thursday — the Phenom X4 9750, which runs at 2.4Ghz; the Phenom X4 9850, which runs at 2.5GHz; and the Phenom 9100e, a low-voltage quad-core processor that runs at 1.8GHz and has a 65-watt power envelope during maximum usage. All the processors contain 2MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

PC makers will ship products with the quad-core processors in the second quarter, AMD said.

The triple-core processors are already shipping in volume to PC makers, AMD said. U.S. vendor ZT Systems will list PCs with the new triple-core Phenoms on Monday, with other “major OEMs” and system vendors shipping products next quarter, AMD said. Many major vendors, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, have already hinted at including the processors in desktops.

Dell has listed plans to use the chip in its OptiPlex 740 business desktop systems. It will ship the triple-core OptiPlex in the second quarter, a company spokeswoman recently said, but she declined to specify which processor will run the desktop. Hewlett-Packard has also listed a desktop on its Bulgarian-language Web site with AMD’s Phenom Triple-Core 8600B processor.

Mesh Computer, a PC vendor in the U.K., is offering the Matrix XXX Plus desktop with the Phenom X3 8400 processor and the Matrix XXX Pro desktop with the Phenom 8600 processor.

Because the triple-core chip is a new concept–set between the widely accepted dual- and quad-cores–it’s unclear how it will fit in the market, said Dean McCarron, founder and principal at Mercury Research.

“You’re going to get a performance enhancement with the extra core above and beyond a dual-core,” McCarron said. But it also falls shy of a quad-core.

AMD designed the triple-core as a way to produce a cheaper chip. The triple-core processor is built on a quad-core CPU, with one core nonfunctional, McCarron said.

The triple-core chip gives AMD a tactical advantage over Intel, McCarron said. Intel will need to answer the triple-core chip with a product priced in the same range while delivering similar performance. Intel can take a dual-core or quad-core processor, adjust features like cache, and price it similar to AMD’s triple-core processor, McCarron said.

Intel Ups Speed of Quad-Core Processors

Intel unveiled two low-voltage, 45-nanometer server processors.

The quad-core Xeon L5400 Series chips run at 50 watts — or 12.5 watts per core — but their performance still reaches the 2.5-GHz mark. Intel is making the chips using the 45nm manufacturing process that it first used with its Penryn family of chips, which were unveiled last November.

The new chips deliver the same performance as their predecessors, the Xeon 5400 Series, but use 40% less power, according to a company spokesman.

Energy-efficient processors are gaining more attention as companies increasingly look to go green — in order to save both power and money. For companies with large data centers, the cost of electricity can sap a significant portion of the IT budget.

“There is a class of customer that is looking more to economically- or environmentally-friendly designs,” said Stephen Thorne, a product line manager in Intel’s server platform group. “And there also are customers who are trying to pack as much performance as possible into their data center.”

Thorne noted that there has been a call for energy-efficient processors in blade configurations. “A lot of users have power constraints or physical constraints,” he added. “Say you have a fixed space in Manhattan. You can’t expand the space, but with lower-energy processors, you could pack more servers into a rack because each server is using less power.”

In January, Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. disclosed that it was picking up speed on delivering its own energy-efficient quad-core chip, the 9100E, which reportedly uses one-third less power than AMD Phenom chips. The 9100E had been slated on in-house AMD road maps to ship in either the second or third quarter. The chip is now on the docket to be released this quarter.

And the clock is quickly ticking down on the first quarter. So if AMD’s new chip is still on track, it should ship this week.

Intel reported that its new Xeon processors have a 50% larger cache than its previous-generation, low-voltage quad-core Xeon processors. They also have 12MB of on-die cache and dedicated 1333-MHz front-side buses.

Thorne said Intel was able to lower the power consumption on the new chips through a combination of using the 45nm manufacturing process, running them at a slightly slower speed and lowering the voltage across all the cores to parse out the reduction.

Vendors supporting the new Xeon chips include Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM and NEC.

Intel also announced that it expects to begin shipping its L5210 dual-core processor, which will boast a 40-watt rating, a clock speed of 3 GHz, a 6MB cache and a 1333-MHz front-side bus.

MSI Unviels MSI N9800GX2 Series Graphics Card

MSI unveiled its latest MSI N9800GX2 Series graphics card. The card is engineered for extreme graphics performance. The MSI N9800GX2 Series is a dual GPU-based graphics card that provides a complete, high definition entertainment and gaming solution for the PC. The MSI N9800GX2 Series comes with total 256 units stream processors and a combined 512-bit memory interface.

With nVidia HybridPower technology, two on-board GPUs and total 1GB graphics memory built-in, MSI N9800GX2 is claimed to be the fastest graphics card available.

The nVidia HybridPower technology delivers graphics performance when the user needs it and low-power operation when the user doesn’t. The technology lets the user switch from GeForce 9800 GX2-based graphics card to the motherboard GeForce GPU when running less graphically-intensive applications for a silent, low power PC experience.

The MSI N9800GX2 Series supports Quad nVidia SLI technology. A 4-way AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) is also provided, for the world’s fastest gaming solution under Windows Vista with state-of-the-art drivers.