Advanced Micro Devices Inc rolled out a new package of chips for laptops yesterday, a major overhaul of its mobile lineup the chip maker hopes will help it climb out of a deep financial trough.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company, saddled with debt and hurt by product delays, is betting consumers will gravitate toward its new Turion brand processor and related chipset — part of a package that chip makers call a “platform” and sell together — because of their focus on high-definition video playback.
This new generation of Turion laptop chips will appear at launch in twice as many different computers — from Hewlett-Packard Co, Acer Inc, Toshiba Corp and others — as the previous generation, released two years ago, AMD said.
Chip makers AMD, Intel Corp and Nvidia Corp are battling harder over high-end graphics as more people watch movies and television programs on their home computers and as operating systems and Web applications require better visuals.
To that end, AMD’s new chips, which were unveiled at the Computex computer show in Taiwan, rely heavily on parts from ATI Technologies, a graphics chip supplier that AMD acquired for US$5.6 billion in 2006 to help it challenge Nvidia and much larger Intel.
Intel is the world’s No. 1 maker of microprocessors, the brains of personal computers. AMD is a distant No. 2, and with the acquisition of ATI now makes standalone graphics chips. Nvidia is the market leader in standalone graphics chips.
AMD hopes that by infusing its general-purpose chips with more advanced graphics capabilities it can boost their appeal and help the company increase its market share.
AMD has racked up more than US$4 billion in losses over the last six quarters as Intel snatched away market share with newer parts and AMD struggled to digest the pricey ATI acquisition.
AMD’s new Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core mobile processors, which come in clock speeds up to 2.4 gigahertz, are accompanied by powerful new chipsets, a separate set of chips that do most of the graphics work — absent a standalone graphics chip — and control how the processor communicates with the rest of the computer.
AMD says that its chipsets deliver three times better 3D performance and five times better high-definition image quality than competing models because of the strength of its integrated graphics. AMD also says its chips transmit high-definition videos and photos faster over wireless networks.
The company says demand for its new lineup of laptop chips has been strong.
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