The state of play
Ultra-portable
a little lacking?
Looking back at 2009, AMD's attempted to make notebooks rather sexy
with
the release of the ultra-portable Yukon and Congo platforms.
Based on the Yukon platform, HP's gorgeous-looking
Pavilion
dv2
set our pulses racing for the wrong reasons. Great aesthetics and a
decent street price were compromised by incredibly poor battery life
and substandard thermal control. The dv2 still exists today, complete
with a
better specification, and it remains one of a handful of Yukon-powered
models on the market.
AMD's Congo platform, the natural successor to Yukon, has recently been
exemplified by the
Acer
Ferrari,
sporting a dual-core Athlon X2 L310 chip and a 7-series chipset. It
should be
decent, especially if stock is made available soon, and will fight it
out with other 11.6in ultra-portable notebooks featuring Intel's CULV
platform.
Mainstream
Focusing on the mainstream segment, where AMD really needs to do well,
and branded under the VISION banner, the company will release the
Tigris platform; an update on the maligned Puma
backbone
powering the majority of AMD mid-sized notebooks for the last year.
Tigris will use a range of
Turion,
Athlon, and Sempron
processors that sit on an RS880M
chipset. The IGP contains the
Mobility
Radeon HD 4200-series graphics. The GPU portion is a minor improvement
over incumbent Mobility Radeon HD 3200, as it now includes support for
DX10.1 and UVD2. Basic performance should be similar to the MHD 3200,
though, as both IGPs have 40 stream processors clocked in at 500MHz.
Tigris, then, should benchmark at around the same level as Puma,
assuming same-speed processors are used. What does a Tigris-based
notebook look like? We're glad you asked.
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