AMD steps up dual core Turion efforts

AMD has further narrowed down the delivery window for its first dual core 64-bit mobile Turion processor, promising to start shipping the chip in the first half of 2006.

The company had previously scheduled the chip's launch for 2006. By delivering the dual core mobile processor in the first half of next year, AMD turns up the heat for Intel to deliver its chip on time.

AMD felt confident to promise a release for the chip in the earliest half of its previous forecast because development was progressing smoothly, said Bahr Mahoney, AMD's marketing manager for mobile processors.

The forthcoming chip aims to cut power consumption drastically, making for a 51 per cent increase in battery life to about five hours. Mahoney declined to give out any additional specifications including energy usage or clockspeeds.

However, Intel is still set to beat AMD in launching the first dual core 64-bit mobile chip. Its mobile chip, codenamed Yonah, is scheduled to ship later this year, followed by a public launch in the first quarter of next year. Some analysts even expect Intel to unveil the chip ahead of schedule, mimicking a move that it made last week with the Xeon processor, codenamed Paxville. 

However, AMD claims its chip is designed more elegantly by placing a memory controller inside the processor. This frees up the front size bus that normally communicates with both the hard drive and the memory.

Intel's dual core chips make both processor cores share one "underpowered" front size bus, contented Mahoney, which could result in data backups inside the chip.

"The AMD 64 bit architecture was originally conceived with multi core in mind, so that it scales very well with multiple cores."

The speed of Intel's front size bus in dual core processors is a known problem and Intel has been rumoured to be working on increasing its clockspeed.