While Puma won’t show up in notebooks until mid-2008, it boasts some power-saving technology that may extend notebook battery life by 20% to 6 hours, according to AMD fellow Maurice Steinman.

At the heart of Puma’s bundle of silicon is its new Griffin processor, based on the 65-nm Turion 64 X2 dual-core architecture.

While Griffin’s CPU cores are the same as Turion’s, the chip has been partitioned to cut back on power usage. Notably, it has an on-die northbridge, which houses the memory controller and HyperTransport bus – that is, the system that accesses memory.

AMD has put this memory controller hub on a separate power plane from the CPU cores. Essentially, this means the CPUs can go into reduced power states when they’re not required.

For example, a user clicking through a PowerPoint deck doesn’t require the CPUs to execute instructions, but does require the graphics processor unit, or GPU, to refresh the image. However, when the GPU and the CPUs are on the same power plane, voltage is drawn from all. By putting the memory controller, or northbridge, on its own power plane, this reduces the power drawn from the idle CPUs, Steinman explained.

We think that granularity is important, he said. Our competitor doesn’t have an on-die northbridge.

Additionally, AMD has put each CPU core on its own voltage plane, again to reduce unnecessary power drain. Most laptops now are shipping with dual core, but the reality is you don’t always need both cores, Steinman said. Griffin-powered notebooks running software not written to take advantage of dual-core processing, known as single-threaded applications, will use only one CPU. The upshot is sustained battery life.

While Griffin uses the same CPUs is AMD’s current dual-core processor, it does away with an extra dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, component that services the notebook’s display. While not significant, the absence of this voltage plane buffer brings down the cost of the silicon, which Steinman said was important to cost-sensitive OEMs

Puma has other resource management and intelligence built into it at the CPU, chipset and platform level.

Whether it stands to outpace Intel’s new consumer Centrino Duo or business Centrino Pro platforms, both formerly codenamed Santa Rosa, remains to be seen. Several hundred notebooks powered by Intel’s latest Centrino bundle already are scheduled for release this year. And during its most recent developer’s conference, Intel said it would release its next Centrino platform, codenamed Montevina, sometime next year.

Steinman said Griffin would not be released as a quad-core version. Where mobile quad-core hits AMD’s roadmap is not something AMD is ready to yet share, Steinman said. The company’s next-generation processing technology, dubbed Fusion, is slated for release for mobile sometime in 2009.

Our View

The Griffin processor has some key power-saving advantages, which will help AMD keep pace with Intel. And the integration of some graphics silicon from ATI Technologies, which AMD now owns, is also promising.

However, the Puma platform will offer just incremental performance benefits, while Centrino Duo was touted by Intel as providing as much as twice the performance of earlier platforms.

Still, Puma will help position AMD in a stronger spot in the mobile space, where it previously focused on just lower-cost systems.