Posted on Friday, May 18 2007 @ 12:58 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD revealed lots of details about Griffin, a new mobile architecture that will replace the current Turion notebook processors. However, Griffin isn't based on the new K10 architecture, it still using the old K8 architecture but it's on 65nm and has some improvements.
Right off the bat you see a disparity between AMD's approach and Intel's approach; while the K8 is arguably a better starting point for a mobile-specific architecture than the P6, the K8 was heavily designed for servers and scaled down. But as we've seen, the K8 is quite power efficient, with 35W TDPs easy achievable for dual core versions, so the race isn't over before it has started.
Griffin will go into production at the end of this year, and AMD is targeting availability in the first half to middle of 2008. Given the launch timeframe, much like Phenom, AMD won't be competing with today's Core 2 processors but rather tomorrow's Penryn based notebooks. Penryn does have some mobile-specific power improvements that even Griffin does not, but the opposite is also true as you will soon see. AMD quoted a maximum TDP of 35W for dual core Griffin CPUs. AMD hopes that notebooks based on Griffin can offer beyond 5 hours of battery life, but do keep in mind that battery life will vary greatly based on OEM implementation.
More about Griffin can be read
at AnandTech. The first Griffin chips are expected by mid-2008.
