Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) detailed on Thursday plans for its first-ever chip platform, designed specifically for notebook personal computers, in a bid to regain ground lost to rival Intel.
The platform - a collection of microprocessors, graphics chips and other chips - is aimed at improving battery life and enhancing graphics and video processing performance, AMD said.
Code-named Puma, notebooks with the platform are expected on the market by the middle of 2008, AMD said. The platform also takes advantage of AMD's $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI, which closed in October 2006.
AMD's market share in the first quarter of this year slipped more than 5% to less than 20% for the first time since 2005, as Intel revamped its own product line and slashed prices on older chips.
"Having bought ATI, they really are heading down a path to integrating more and more stuff on to a single piece of silicon," Endpoint Technologies Associates analyst, Roger Kay, said. "They haven't really had much of a platform story before. Intel started talking about platforms years ago."
Key to Puma is an entirely new micro-architecture, used to make a new microprocessor code-named Griffin, AMD said. Among Griffin's features are memory controllers that operate on a separate power plan than the cores, which means the cores can go into significantly reduced power states when not needed.
"We can change frequencies a lot faster with a lot more agility and that's important for Windows Vista," said Maurice Steinman, an AMD researcher based in Boston.
AMD said it was also planning a new chipset - a collection of different types of chips that ties into the microprocessor - that it is calling the RS780.
In addition to the Griffin microprocessor - the central computing engine in computers - the Puma platform includes ATI Radeon graphics chips, Nvidia chipset and graphics technologies and also different wireless technologies, AMD said.
About 44% of all desktop and laptop computers sold in 2006 had graphics cards, as opposed to integrated graphics common in cheaper machines. AMD hopes that proportion will rise this year, as the use of Microsoft's Vista operating system becomes more widespread.
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