The Hindu Business Line : AMD sees smaller desktops, longer-life laptops

Puma consists of `Griffin' (the successor of `Hawk' processor) and the RS780 graphics chip. Design changes include improvements in graphics capabilities and the debut of the HyperTransport 3.0 standard.

Hypertransport

HyperTransport, a competitor to PCI Express, is a data interconnect - a bus that transfers data inside a PC. The current peak speeds of 20-40 GB per sec will be doubled in 3.0. That will mean animations, simulations and virtual reality games can run faster.

"Griffin has been designed from ground-up to enhance the battery life and overall mobile computing performance on a laptop," said Mr Vamsi Krishna, Technical Manager, AMD Far East (India).

Griffin's power-optimised cores are programmed to go into reduced power states and each operates on an independent frequency and voltage, so power consumption is reduced when usage is low, thereby, enhancing battery life.

Desktops will go quad-core next year - with four processing engines ensuring your high definition movie plays without a hitch even as an anti-virus check is done in the background, and automatic downloads are in progress and more!

They will also feature HyperTransport 3.0 and memory controllers.

The CrossFire multi-GPU (graphics processor) support and high definition audio features will also be included.

WHAT'S NEXT? DTX

Desktops will also get smaller, sleeker with AMD's new DTX board. Entering the small form factor segment, the firm has `opened up' the DTX standard so both Intel as well as AMD's CPUs can be placed on it.

The firm hopes to trigger growth in the new market with this move.

"We are promoting the DTX standard for small desktops to vendors. We hope to have the first DTX product prototypes out by end of this year in India," said Mr Krishna.