AMD presents upcoming mobile platform information

Giuseppe Amato from AMD outlined the company's mobile roadmap for the next two years. The presentation is said to be similar to the one from the Fall 2006 AMD Analyst day, but DailyTech says Amato added some interesting details during the session.

Amato remained pretty silent about the upcoming "Hawk" 65nm Turion 64 X2 processors - he only said that they will be available "anytime soon".

A more interesting snip is that in 2008 AMD will make its K10 architecture available to notebooks, this processor family is codenamed Griffin. This chip is similar to the desktop and server K10 chips but will have some modifications for mobile use:

In the past, AMD only optimized server and desktop CPUs for mobile use, Griffin will differ in some areas considerably. For example, a mobile CPU doesn't need the full FPU of the K10 architecture, Amato hypothesized. Additionally, Griffin's design allows the possibility to entirely remove power for the second core, leaving one core active.

Another thing AMD is working on is Hybrid Graphics, this is "an exciting combination" of integrated and discrete graphics. The main goal of the Hybrid Graphics technology, which should arrive this fall, is to use the integrated graphics when the user is on the go to save battery power:

When the platform is connected to a wall outlet, a discrete graphics card immediately switches on, delivering higher performance. This switching will work without a restart and its behaviour should be user-configurable – at least to some degree.

Another interesting snip from Amato is that mobile IGP chipsets from AMD will start featuring DisplayPort support in 2008. He also added users will be able to connect HDMI and DVI devices to the DisplayPort by using adapters.

In 2008 we can also expect an IGP chipset from AMD with a R600-derived graphics core with DirectX 10 and Universal Video Decoder (UVD) support. The UVD part is useful for low-end systems, it takes the decoding of H.264 video out of the processor's hand, so that even a 1GHz Sempron processor can flawlessly play 1080p video content.