Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will uncage its Puma laptop chip platform at events in Taipei and Paris on Wednesday. It's the first new laptop platform the microprocessor manufacturer has developed since it acquired graphics chip specialist ATI -- and perhaps the last such platform in which central processor and graphics processor will be separate components. "The next generation is all about graphics and throughput," said Leslie Sobon, AMD's worldwide director of product marketing. "Nobody needs to open Word and Excel documents faster," she said, so instead AMD is focusing on speeding up video and video games performance for home users.
There's no "Puma inside" logo to promote it, though: Customers looking for the latest chips will need to check that they're getting a laptop with an AMD Turion X2 Ultra processor (the "Ultra" is new), the 780 chipset and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 Series graphics chip -- or maybe two, if they want to profit from one of the platform's power-saving, performance-enhancing features: hybrid graphics. Some of the graphics chips that work with the Turion X2 Ultra are already on the market, but AMD is adding a discrete graphics chip at the high end of the range, the 3870.
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