Not impressed
With Intel’s long awaited next generation notebook platform Centrino 2 – codenamed Montevina – getting all the headlines yesterday, we asked AMD what they thought of it.
Patrick Moorhead (pictured), the VP for advanced marketing at AMD, thinks the Achilles Heel of Centrino 2 is its integrated graphics. “Clearly graphics matter more than ever,” he said. “Ninety percent of the notebooks sold at retail in the U.S. include integrated graphics (worldwide this figure is about 70 percent) and yet Intel Montevina is being launched only with discrete graphics.”
He went on to question Intel’s progress on the integrated graphics front. “It is thanks to AMD and NVIDIA’s discrete graphics that Intel is even able to launch today because their own IGP capabilities are still clearly behind the curve,” he said. “At the end of May 2008, Intel CEO Paul Otellini stated that the discrete graphics market is where most of the consumer volume is. The truth according to independent research firms like NPD and Mercury Research shows that he opposite is true.”
Of course, AMD launched its own new notebook platform a month ago, codenamed Puma. Moorhead compared that launch favourably to Centrino 2. "The next-generation AMD notebook platform is in market with no delays, workaround or performance issues,” he said.
“Conversely, Montevina appears poised to fail in delivering the key features that consumers are looking for in a mainstream notebook platform – including the inability to watch their favorite HD movies on a battery, to lingering game compatibility issues with some of today’s most mainstream games.”
Moorhead stressed the advantages he thinks Puma has over Centrino 2 in HD video play-back. “The next-generation AMD notebook platform includes the AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics and is designed to offer exceptional HD visual performance,” he said, “including full 1080p playback capability for Blu-ray and other HD content without any compatibility issues, stutters or lags thanks to its integrated Unified Video Decoder (UVD) technology.”
“It has been widely reported in the press that Intel is struggling to deliver this same promise, as they are unable to support all of the most common video formats,” he concluded.
