AMD Previews New Notebooks, Consumer Products

Hewlett-Packard offers a wide range of AMD-based laptops, as well as tablets. The Pavilion tx2500, which has a 12.1-inch screen, uses the newer AMD “Puma” mobile platform, which includes a dual-core Turion X2 Ultra processor and an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card. While the tx2500 is billed as a consumer notebook, AMD has targeted it at small and midsize businesses and vertical markets.

The ATI XGP, or External Graphics Platform, allows a notebook that comes with integrated graphics to expand to use a discrete graphics card. In this case, a Fujitsu Siemens notebook is plugged into an external system through a PCI Express 2 connector that houses an ATI Radeon 3450 graphics card and supports as many as three displays.

This is a close-up view of the ATI XGP external graphics device with the PCI Express 2 connector using the ATI Radeon 3450 graphics card that supplements the integrated graphics used in a typical notebook. This Fujitsu configuration will be available in late 2008.

The HP Pavilion DV5Z is considered by AMD to represent the bulk of the laptop market, easily crossing from the SMB to consumer market. The Pavilion DV5Z can use either an older Athlon processor or the newer Turion Ultra processor, and comes with an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card and a 15.4-inch display.

After years of only using Intel chips, Toshiba began using AMD processors in 2007. The Satellite M305D laptop is part of a new wave of AMD-based PCs. This notebook, with a 14.1-inch display, uses the Turion Ultra chip, AMD M780V chip set and an ATI graphics card.

The higher-end HP Pavilion DV7Z has a 17-inch display and a range of multimedia features. These features include an HDMI 1.3 port for connecting the laptop to an HD TV, making the notebook the most consumer-oriented of the newer AMD-based machines

The gaming market allows AMD to demonstrate the outer limits of how its CPU and GPU technologies perform, especially compared with Intel and Nvidia. AMD provided a sneak preview of its AMD 790GX chip set for gaming PCs that use the ATI CrossFire X graphics technology. This machine also utilized a quad-core Phenom 9550 Black Edition chip running at 2.6GHz.

AMD is also looking to sell its tri-core Phenom processor to the gaming and enthusiast PC markets. In this case, AMD built its own white-box PC to show off the tri-core Phenom X3 series, which offers clock speeds of up to 2.4GHz.