WHILE WE WAIT for the official word from AMD, we’ve come across a lot of details on AMD’s upcoming mobile processors, be it Phenom II’s, Turion II’s or Athlon II’s. As you see, AMD is ready to refresh most of its mobile CPU range if these details prove to be accurate. We think this is set to take place very soon, especially with all of the product leaks and announcements.
Starting from the top, AMD is readying three new mobile Phenom II X4 processors, namely the P920, the N930 and the X920 BE. The P920 is a 25W model with a fairly slow 1.6GHz clock speed, but it’s by far the most power frugal mobile quad-core processor to date. The N930, which we’ve already reported about in the Dell and Acer leaks, is clocked at 2GHz with a 35W TDP. The most interesting part is the X920 BE, as BE stands for Black Edition, which suggests that the multiplier is unlocked. We’re not sure how useful an overclockable CPU is in a notebook, but with a base clock speed of 2.3GHz this is also the fastest of the new quad-cores, though this also means that the TDP goes up to 45W, the same as Intel’s quad-core Core i7M models.
The Phenom II X3 family consists of only two members, the P820 and the N830. Again, the P820 is a 25W part, although with a slightly higher clock speed of 1.8GHz. The N830 is the second processor we’ve already reported about and it has a 2.1GHz clock speed and a 35W TDP. The last two Phenom II’s are the X2 models and in this case we’re looking at the N620, which HP will be using, and the X620 BE. The N620 has a clock speed of 2.8GHz and a 35W TDP while the X620 BE is clocked at 3.1GHz with a 45W TDP. All of the mobile Phenom II’s have 512KB of cache per core.
The new Turion II X2’s are somewhat different, although the lettering before the model numbers remains the same. There are only two new models, the dual-core P520 and N530. The P520 is a 25W part with a clock speed of 2.3GHz while the N530 is a 35W part with a 2.5GHz clock speed. However, both of these CPU’s feature 1MB of L2 cache per core, which should help to improve performance in some applications. Finally we have the Athlon II X2’s, and here we’re looking at the P320 with a 2.1GHz clock speed and a 25W TDP, while the N330 is clocked at 2.3GHz with a 35W TDP. Both of these models feature a 512KB cache per core.
Overall it looks like AMD has a fairly compelling mobile CPU lineup and all of these new AMD CPU’s support low power DDR3 memory as well as standard DDR3 memory. Sadly the mobile Phenom II’s don’t appear to have any L3 cache and with only 512KB per core they won’t be performing as well as their desktop counterparts. We would expect to see the Black Edition models in some gaming notebooks and we can see the dual-core 3.1GHz model become a popular option in that market segment.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
Latest posts by Lars-Göran Nilsson (see all)
- AMD and Nvidia set to take on LucidLogix Virtu - Apr 7, 2011
- Notebooks and hard drives to increase in price - Apr 6, 2011
- Motherboard makers craving affordable USB 3.0 solutions - Apr 6, 2011
- IEEE approves the IEEE 802.16m standard - Apr 1, 2011
- LucidLogix scores Intel as first Virtu customer - Apr 1, 2011