AMD Introduces Puma Platform

Yesterday was NVIDIA's turn in the spotlight with the introduction of the GeForce 9 Mobile GPUs and Hybrid SLI. Today the attention turns to AMD with their new announcements coming out of Computex. AMD has introduced their next-generation notebook "Puma" platform, its fastest notebook graphics processor ever, an external graphics solution for notebooks, and PowerXpress improvements.

AMD's Puma Platform is made up of a dual-core Turion X2 Ultra (or Mobile Sempron), 802.11n wireless, Mobility Radeon HD 3000 graphics, M780 Chipset, DDR2-800 memory, and DASH 1.0 support. Puma can be read about in this press release.

Also announced this morning is AMD's highest-performing mobile graphics processor, which is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800. This GPU is compatible with the Puma platform CrossFireX, PCI Express 2.0, Avivo HD, PowerPlay, and other improvements. The Mobility Radeon HD 3800 should work with the Catalyst Linux driver already, or we would expect the support to arrive with Catalyst 8.6 later this month. Its press release is here.

The third announcement coming out of the AMD camp and is also a Puma-friendly technology is XGP. XGP, or External Graphics Platform, Technology is AMD's new external PCI Express 2.0 graphics platform. ATI XGP is designed around the Mobility Radeon HD 3800 and this external graphics solution is even compatible with CrossFireX. With XGP using PCI Express 2.0 and it having a bit extra bandwidth, AMD has even placed a few USB 2.0 connectors on the external chassis to allow consumers to connect a variety of devices. The graphics card is held in this external chassis while there is a "specially designed self-latching, easy-connecting PCIe 2.0 cable" for interfacing the graphics card with the Turion X2 Ultra notebook. AMD's XGP Technology is a bit similar to the ASUS XG Station, which was announced a year and a half ago. However, the external graphics solution from ASUS uses an Express Card interface. Read about XGP in this press release.