On the presentation of AMD PUMA platform we have met our old acquaintance Mr. Pierre Brunswick - AMD regional Sales Manager in CIS, Russia, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Since we were interested in details not mentioned in formal presentation we asked him some questions. As you will see his answers gave us very interesting informations.
InsideHW: After presentation of PUMA mobile platform it is obvious that differences are in chipset itself and changes in CPU architecture. Which of these two received more innovations?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: Essence of our platform is power consumption efficiency resulting in prolonged autonomy. To fulfill that goal we created new chipset (780M) and present Turion CPUs upgraded with elements of Phenom design and created Turion Ultra CPUs (Griffin).
InsideHW: How did You achieved this kind of power consumption efficiency?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: Quite simply by spending power only when it is needed. CPU can set each core for itself by changing its frequency in four steps and voltage in three steps. Significant reductions are made in power consumption of chipset which uses less power than any competitors solution, and in case of lower load on HyperTransport bus it can disable lines that are redundant and save power even more.
InsideHW: We assume that this will result in increased autonomy of mobile devices when operating on battery. What can end users expect in this area?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: Our first tests show that in some cases autonomy can be prolonged even for 90 minutes but, in most cases, users can expect 30-40minutes prolonged autonomy of their devices that operate on batteries. Of course this results will depend on each user preferences, but never the less we made an effort to use even minimum possibility for power saving and prolong autonomy as much as possible.
InsideHW: One of things that attracted our attention during presentation of PUMA, was XGP or external graphics port. Can you tell us more about XGP, and particularly is necessary its presence in notebook so it can receive PUMA badge?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: You are right, it is very exciting possibility. Idea is very simple: to produce port through which can external "box" (with one or more integrated graphics cards) use PCI Express 2.0 resulting in possibility of using full graphics power on notebook. XGP isn't necessary a part of PUMA platform, more a feature, and implementation of XGP is left out for manufacturers to decide will they implement it or not. Fujitsu Siemens is our first partner that produced one such solution, but they are not exclusive, so in next weeks we can expect from rest of our partners to come out with their solutions.
InsideHW: What are differences between this solution (PUMA) and solution that ASUS presented more than a year ago?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: Without any deep technical details, their solution uses Express Card interface and ours full wideness of HyperTransport bus. Simply put, bandwidth of our solution is higher and with minimal investment allows full performance utilization of external graphics card. The bottom line is that our solution can work on any computer that uses HyperTransport bus and deliver maximum performances.
InsideHW: Does it mean that even Intel based notebook can use XGP?
Mr. Pierre Brunswick: Of course, the same way users can create CrossFire on Intel based motherboard, users of Intel based notebooks will be able to use XGP. There will be some limitation factors in terms of functionality, like necessity to restart notebook to switch from external to integrated graphics card and vice versa, but we thinks users won't be withheld by this.
