AMD Puma no match for Intel's Montevina?

TG Daily reports the computer industry isn't impressed by AMD's upcoming mobile Puma platform. The site claims the AMD Griffin processor actually uses more power than its predecessor, the Turion 64, and that's of course a very bad thing when you're creating a processor for the notebook market.

The 780M chipset for Puma is not really different than the already existing desktop-based 780G chipset (it will use the RS780M Northbridge and SB700 Southbridge chips). But AMD didn't spare a dime to get the most recent TSMC production line for RS780M, which takes the chipset on a power diet, we hear.

The Griffin processor itself, however, is an in-between product of the K8 and K10 architectures: The processing cores belong to the old world, while the power optimization of memory controller/Northbridge and HyperTransport 3 are taken from the Barcelona/Agena generation of CPUs. Griffin also comes with three independent power planes (Barcelona/Agena has only two).

Performance-wise, we were told that Griffin won’t be able to match Intel’s Core 2 Duo speed, which will be an obvious problem. However, Puma could be running circles around Montevina as soon as you mention the term 3D. RS780M is expected to be a much stronger (DirectX 10) graphics engine than what the Santa Rosa platform offers. But we will have to wait for Intel’s new Montevina platform to get a better idea of how the rivalry will pan out.

The good news for Puma is that the platform is on target to be available for the for Back-to-school season.

The reporter also notes that AMD doesn't care that much about processor performance anymore, they're now trying to push "platform performance".