2. Turion 64 Ancestry, Models And Features

A look at the Turion 64's origins shows how it is easy to determine that it's a direct offshoot of the Athlon 64 desktop processor. Like its predecessor, the Turion 64 is crafted using 90-nm silicon on insulator process technology in Fab 30 at AMD's Dresden, Germany production site. In contrast to mobile products from Intel, this processor already supports current and upcoming 64 bit operating systems and applications. In addition, this processor handles SSE3 multimedia instructions, which the competition does not yet support. This should give this CPU a performance advantage of up to 5% when executing SSE3-optimized applications such as Pinnacle Studio or the Lame MP3 encoder.

The L2 Cache of the Turion 64 comes in both 1 MB and 512 kB models, and consumes more than 50% of the processor's surface area. On the die, which is about 0.42 inches x 0.42 inches, or 0.1781 square inches (115 square millimeters in size), you'll find a total of 114 million transistors. That's about as many that the Turion's big brother, the Mobile Athlon 64, offers, which is also available in Models 3000+, 3200+, 3400+, and 3700+. This, too, is an unmistakable sign of what's bound to come in the near future.

There is also the original mobile Athlon 64 model - the 2800+, as well as the Athlon 64 for desktop replacement notebooks. This chips had a surface area of 7.60 square inches (193 square millimeters; 67% larger) and supported only 106 million transistors. But these were built using 130-nm process technology and consumed up to a maximum of 82 W of power.

Turion 64 MT-34 & Mobile Athlon 64 3000+: The scion consumes only up to 24 W, but its predecessor could consume a maximum of nearly 82 W!

Despite a noticeable increase in the number of transistors as compared to the original Mobile Athlon 64, the Turion 64's maximum power consumption is only 25 to 35 W. This is a byproduct of the 90-nm SOI process technology, developed and perfected since the earlier processor's debut. It is also noteworthy that the maximum power consumption for Turion 64 processors is included as part of each model's name in that line.