Amidst the Berlin launch of new PCs coming from Hewlett-Packard are several laptop models based on the Puma chip platform from Advanced Micro Devices.
Eight of the laptop models unveiled by HP this week are based on Puma, including the Pavilion dv4, Pavilion dv5, Pavilion dv7 and Compaq Presario CQ50. Pricing and detailed specifications of these laptops were not immediately available.
Puma, unveiled last week at the Computex exhibition in Taipei, includes a dual-core Turion X2 Ultra processor, an M780 chipset, and a Wi-Fi chip. The notebooks also come with ATI’s Radeon HD 3000 graphics chips, AMD said.
One of the main advantages of the Puma platform is the chipset, which includes a hardware decoder for high-definition video formats, such as Blu-ray. With this feature, the processor utilization rate remains low while watching a high-definition video.
Previous AMD products, as well as Intel’s current notebook chips, relied on the processor for this task.
Intel plans to follow AMD’s lead in the mobile space, releasing a high-definition video decoder in the Cantiga chipset that is part of the company’s Montevina notebook platform. Montevina, which will be called Centrino 2 when it’s released in August, was delayed by several weeks because of issues with the integrated-graphics chipset.