Q3'05 AMD Roadmap; DDR2 and New Sockets for AMD

Mobile and Transportable Processors

AMD has been trailing in the mobile performance per Watt competition ever since Intel launched the Pentium M. While they have announced a name change to their Mobile Athlon 64 lineup, they still appear to be using a low power Athlon 64 derivative as opposed to something designed from the ground up for the mobile sector. The good news is that AMD's base designs are generally far less power hungry than Intel's Pentium 4, so a separate design isn't really required. Like Intel, AMD has three categories of mobile processors. First are the DTR models which are essentially just desktop parts put into a laptop, although they may run with slightly lower voltage requirements. The next level up the mobility scale is referred to as Transportable, and the power requirements are 62W or less. Finally, the true Mobile parts are classified as either 35W or 25W parts, with the 25W targeting the Thin and Light category of notebooks. The DTR processors can basically be any of the regular desktop parts, so we'll skip that segment and start with the Transportable chips.

At the high end of the Transportable segment are the Athlon 64 Mobile parts. All of these parts feature 1MB of L2 cache, and most have been available for some time. AMD has recently transitioned from the older 130nm Odessa core - basically a lower power version of the Clawhammer - to the 90nm SOI Newark core. The only new Mobile Athlon 64 part is the 4000+, which runs at the same clock speed as the FX-55 processor but only supports single channel memory. As virtually any socket 754 board should have no trouble supporting these mobile variants, 754 owners looking to upgrade for additional CPU performance might be interested in checking out these parts. The price is generally a bit higher, and a switch to socket 939 is probably the better course of action if you can manage it, but a change from the 1.8 GHz 512K 2800+ to the 4000+ would provide a substantial boost to performance.

The Mobile Sempron is also undergoing a change from the older Georgetown core to the new Albany core (and before Georgetown was the Dublin core). You might still see some of the older core versions out there, but the Albany core is the preferred model, as the 90nm SOI provides much better power and thermal characteristics. While the desktop Sempron parts are slated to get 64-bit support, the mobile parts will remain 32-bit only for the time being. To quote the roadmap, "AMD will introduce 64-bit enabled Mobile AMD Sempron only when it makes sense for our value notebook customers." In other words, most value notebooks ship with lower end components, so 64-bit addressing isn't going to be terribly important for a laptop with 256 or 512 MB of RAM.

In the future, the Mobile platform will also transition to DDR2 support, only the thin and light notebooks will use socket S1 rather than socket M2. S1 appears to mostly be targeting a smaller package size, as it will also be a dual-channel DDR2 platform with support for the security and virtualization enhancements. Two code names appear on the roadmap for S1 parts, the Taylor core will be a dual core Turion 64 processor with security and virtualization support while the Keene will be a single core part without Pacifica and Presidio technologies. For the full size notebooks and desktop replacements (DTR), M2 will be used and the Trinidad core bears the Mobile Athlon 64 moniker with specs identical to Windsor - though cache sizes could differ, we admit. That means dual core, dual-channel DDR2, and security plus virtualization technologies. A Mobile Sempron part based off of the Richmond core drops the virtualization support and runs on a single core. All of these DDR2 mobile parts are scheduled for a Q1'06 release. Having mentioned the Taylor core and Turion 64 brings us to the next group of mobile processors.

We had a small article on the Turion 64 Launch, but there hasn't been a lot to say since then. OEMs haven't been quick to jump on the Turion bandwagon, though there are laptops with the processor available now. The Turion naming scheme is similar to that of the Opteron in that a two digit model indicates relative performance, with higher numbers being better. The second letter indicates suitability for mobile use, with "A" being less suitable and "Z" being ideal. On present models there are only two letters used, L and T, and they correlate to the typical maximum power requirements. "T" models have a maximum TDP of 25W while the "L" models have a maximum TDP of 35W. While both are higher than the 22W rating of Pentium M parts, the T variants ought to perform similarly with Cool n' Quiet enabled. As you can see in the table, the number designation at present is the same for similarly clocked Turion chips, though the T models (model Ts?) will cost more.

All of the Turion parts currently use the Lancaster core, which is a 1MB socket 754 part made on 90nm SOI. As we mentioned before, dual core Turion parts made with the Taylor core will move to socket S1 in mid 2006, competing against the dual core Yonah parts from Intel. Which part will actually be better is anyone's guess right now, as we expect both platforms to offer several improvements over current mobile parts. The one advantage that AMD does have is 64-bit support - we haven't heard anything about Yonah support EM64T yet, so we would guess that initial shipments will remain 32-bit. With Longhorn also scheduled to ship in 2006, the move to 64-bit applications may finally pick up steam in the mainstream market. Turion isn't the only low power processor AMD has, though, so let's take a look at the Thin and Light Sempron parts.

All of the Thin and Light Semprons have a TDP of 25W, the same as the Turion MT chips. They also run on socket 754, like the Turion, though future parts will move to S1. Previous Mobile Sempron chips have used the Dublin and Sonora cores - mobile variants of the Newcastle and Paris desktop cores, respectively. The interesting thing is that the earlier Dublin-based Mobile Semprons used to bear the Athlon XP name, even though they were Athlon 64 derivatives since they ran on socket 754. AMD is now switching to the Roma core, which is the Mobile version of the Palermo core. It adds SSE3 support to the design, among other small tweaks. Most of the Roma chips should be available shortly, with the only new model being the Sempron 3400+ scheduled for early 2006.

There are a lot of overlapping code names and models in AMD's mobile sector, and to be honest we're not exactly sure what differences - if any - exist between the Turion Lancaster and the Mobile Athlon 64 Newark. They may be identical with the difference being binning, or there may be some small architectural tweaks that separate them. The same holds for the Albany vs. Roma and Georgetown vs. Sonora comparisons. But enough about mobile chips; let's get on to the last sector.