Mobile Wars – The Turion Strikes Back

It’s no secret that Advanced Micro Devices, commonly referred to by the acronym AMD, received a fat lip from Intel last year over who was the daddy when it came to mobile chips for laptops. Now the “Turion” flavour of processor is finally being put to use after it was unveiled at CES in January. Essentially the chip is a mobile Athlon, with dedicated 64 bit processing on a single chip, it also has been designed specifically by AMD for the mobile market, not just re-engineered from a desktop chip.

Acer have been busy as well with the new chip. They recently showed off their new line of Turion notebooks at the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany which has been running this week and comes to an end Wednesday 16th March. AMD hopes that the trend that Acer has started will catch on. With a spokesman from Acer predicting that 51% of notebooks will be in the thin and light category by 2007, there could be a huge market for this processor in the near future.

His predictions seem to be coming true with a whole slew of manufacturers coming on board to include the new Turion chip in their notebooks including Fujitsu-Siemens, Asus, Averatec, BenQ, and Sharp.

Some leading PC players are not so keen to embrace AMD’s newest Turion child, with Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM all giving the Turion a wide berth, but I have a sneaking suspicion they might have to eat humble pie and get with the mobile program before long, only time will tell.

So it looks like the laptop processor fight that AMD lost last year with Intel, was not the whole war, but merely round one.

By Ian Bandy

Wednesday, March 23, 2005