AMD has just announced the long awaited dual-core mobile processor—the Turion 64 X2 Mobile. The Turion 64 X2 Mobile is the first and only x86-64 compatible processor designed for mobile use. With notable features such as Multi-core Power Management, Digital Media Xpress, and Virtualization technologies the Turion 64 X2 Mobile was designed with thin and light notebooks in mind.
Multi-core power management builds upon the existing PowerNow! technology and allows dynamic clocking of both processor cores for reduced power consumption at idle while Digital Media Xpress accelerates multimedia tasks such as image processing, audio/video encoding/decoding, and 3D graphics performance. AMD’s Virtualization technology brings improved performance for virtual computing environments — similar to Intel’s Vanderpool technology.
Reference platforms built for the Turion 64 X2 Mobile have been developed by ATI and NVIDIA using an open platform with retail notebooks available this quarter. Manufacturers expected to deliver notebooks featuring the Turion 64 X2 Mobile include Acer, ASUS, BenQ, Flocity, FSC, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, MSI, NEC, ECS, Packard Bell, Sotec and TongFang.
With the Turion 64 X2 Mobile, AMD has migrated from Socket 754 to the new mobile specific S1 socket. This leaves existing owners of Turion 64 based notebooks with no dual-core upgrade path. Nonetheless, AMD’s Turion 64 X2 Mobile arrives ready to take on Intel’s Core Duo mobile processors at a lower price point. The new Turion 64 X2 processors are also AMD’s first to feature DDR2 memory.
Pricing for the Turion 64 X2 Mobile starts at $184 for the TL-50 which is a 1.6 GHz/256KB L2 cache variant and tops out with the $354 512KB L2 cache equipped TL-60 clocked at 2GHz.
Global Tech News recently published a long forecast roadmap of AMD Turion processor cores a few weeks ago.