AMD unveils Tigris and Congo notebook platform

Improved performance and increased battery life

AMD rebranding structure

Earlier this year we saw AMD debut relatively a low power AMD Athlon Neo CPU for ultrathin laptops like the HP Pavilion dv2. This processor was paired with an ATI graphics card and it could handle HD video on laptops with a 12 inch display. Now, AMD has launched two new platforms for notebooks - AMD Tigris and AMD Congo platform.

The Tigris laptop platform boasts features like:

• Full 1080p video support
• DirectX 10.1 support
• Video encoding by Radeon HD 4200 GPU
• 45nm dual core Caspian CPUs (speeds ranging up to 2.6GHz)

This new platform will result in an improvement of 42 percent for multimedia performance and 25% percent for battery life.  Users can get up to an hour and 55 minutes of "active use" and just under five hours in idle, according to AMD.

On the other hand, the Congo platform, offers the same HD video and DX10.1 support but, In terms of battery life it offers two hours 26 minutes of usage, thanks to its HD 3200 GPU and dual core Neo chips inside (1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo X2 dual core processor L335).

AMD is also planning to simplify its branding for processors. Currently, there are around 221 different AMD stickers for diffrent processor types. AMD is planning to reduce this number to just three stickers for most computers: AMD Vision, AMD Vision Premium, and AMD Vision Ultimate. The basic Vision sticker will go on systems that can handle basic computing tasks but which aren’t really optimized for HD video. Premium systems will have support for DirectX 10.1, Blu-Ray video, and longer battery life. AMD Vision Ultimate labels will go on systems with extra support for HD video editing and encoding.