INTEL HOUSE

Mountain House (CA) - Computex Taipei 2008 is just around the corner and news of what we can expect to see at the conference is already trickling in. Nvidia will release its new GeForce GTX 280 and 260 GPUs, AMD its Radeon 4850 and 4870 as well as its Puma notebook platform. According to our sources at a top-tier OEM/ODM, AMD will be announcing Puma as well as the Griffin processor on June 3 (local time), the first day of the show. Puma will consist of the Griffin CPU, which we now know will be called “Turion Ultra”, a mobile version of the 780G chipset (RS780M), the Mobility Radeon 3200 graphics chip (integrated in the mobile 780G chipset) as well as Wi-Fi chips from the usual suspects (Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Ralink).Puma will show up in all major notebook form factors (12.1”, 13.3”, 15.4” and 17") and will be on display with ATI Mobility Radeon 3450, 3650 and 3850 discrete graphics chips. SSDs will be available as an option, albeit in a very limited fashion: Puma will aim for the volume business and consumer markets and SSD simply are still “too expensive” for these segments. That scenario should change with the arrival of AMD’s 2009 Shrike mobile platform (better known for its Fusion processor), which is expected to see a greater adoption of SSD devices.At this time, we have no information whether Puma and its Turion Ultra will be available in volume from day one. Stay tuned for more information coming soon.Despite the fact that a first Intel Montevina notebook has been announced already, don’t expect the platform to debut at Computex. Montevina notebooks are likely to have a significant presence at the show, but our sources indicated that the platform will not be launched until later in the month.