AMD’s 2009 Mainstream Notebook Platform Announced

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has announced the 2009 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform “Tigris”, featuring new processors, a new integrated graphics chip, and improved multimedia technologies.

The platform includes next-gen AMD Turion II Ultra, Turion II, and Athlon II dual core mobile processors, with clock speeds ranging from 2GHz to 2.6GHz, BUS speed of 3,200MHz or 3,600MHz, and 1MB or 2MB of L2 cache, depending on model. The chips are based on 45nm production technology, replacing older 65nm parts. The new Athlons and Turions have a power consumption of 35W, and support for 64-bit computing and virtualization.

Tigris’ integrated graphics chip is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200. Its 3DMark 06 base score, reflecting GPU’s gaming performance, is 1,800 points. That’s up from around 1,500 points with previous 2008 AMD Mainstream “Puma” Notebook Platform with the HD 3200 GPU.

AMD’s new platform also provides faster GPU-assisted video encoding, hardware-based high definition (HD) content decoding, as well as video upscaling that makes lower resolution videos to look better when shown on a larger screen.

According to the chip maker, the Platform demonstrates an active battery life of nearly two hours and a resting battery life of nearly five hours.

The company says laptops featuring the 2009 AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform became available on September 2 in certain Asian countries, while broad global availability of more than 50 platform designs are scheduled to coincide with the forthcoming release of the Microsoft Windows 7 OS.

AMD also launched today the Second Generation AMD Ultrathin Platform for small and light laptops.