AMD's "Caspain" and "Champlain" Mobile Processor Line

AMD recently unleashed an updated mobile lineup with some unpleasant surprises regarding FPUs.

The current lineup of mobile processors is codenamed "Champlain" and uses K10 CPUs with AMD 880M chipset and SB810 southbridge.

"Caspian" will follow the same trend but will feature quad core Phenom II and Athlon II based processors, notably based on the "Deneb" quad core and "Callisto" dual core processor designs. It will also feature an updated SB820 southbridge that brings Gigabit Ethernet and SATA 6Gbps. 

Caspian

HyperTransport (1800 MHz, 3600 MT/s on M6xx/M5xx models, 1600 MHz, 3200 MT/s for M3xx models)
All CPUs support AMD-V virtualization extensions and SIMD instructions up to SSE4a, but not SSE4.

25W TDP:

• Sempron II - Single core, 1MiB L2 cache
• M100: 2000 MHz (only 64 bit FPU)
• M120: 2100 MHz (only 64 bit FPU)

35W TDP:

• Athlon II - Dual core, 1MiB L2 cache
• M300: 2000 MHz (only 64 bit FPU)
• M320: 2100 MHz (only 64 bit FPU)
• M340: 2200 MHz (only 64 bit FPU)
• Turion II - Dual core, 1MiB L2 cache
• M500: 2200 MHz
• M520: 2300 MHz
• M540: 2400 MHz
• Turion II Ultra - Dual core, 2MiB L2 cache
• M600: 2400 MHz
• M620: 2500 MHz
• M640: 2600 MHz
• M660: 2700 MHz

Champlain

All CPUs support AMD-V virtualization extensions and SIMD instructions up to SSE4a, but not SSE4. All CPUs feature 3600MT/s Hyper Transport link:

• Phenom II - Quad core, 2MiB L2 cache ("Deneb" based core)
• X920: 2300MHz, 45W TDP (Black Edition)
• N930: 2000MHz, 35W TDP
• P920: 1600MHz, 25W TDP
• Phenom II - Triple core, 1.5MiB L2 cache
• N830: 2100MHz, 35W TDP
• P820: 1800MHz, 25W TDP
• Phenom II - Dual core, 2MiB L2 cache ("Deneb" based core)
• X620: 3100MHz, 45W TDP (Black Edition)
• N620: 2100MHz, 35W TDP
• Turion II - Dual core, 2MiB L2 cache ("Callisto" based core)
• N530: 2500MHz, 35W TDP
• P520: 2300MHz, 25W TDP
• Athlon II - Dual core, 1MiB L2 cache, 64bit FPU
• N330: 2300MHz, 35W TDP
• P320: 2100MHz, 25W TDP
• AMD V Series - Single core, 512KiB L2 cache, 64bit FPU
• V120: 2200MHz, 25W TDP

Interesting processor lineups, especially when considering AMD's 25W triple and quad core offerings. I'm curious to see the battery performance on those but at least for actual performance, they are gearing up to be pretty decent.

What bothers me though is AMD disabling half the FPU on cheaper models. There is no apparent reason for doing this other than for market differentiation. If you want something that has a decent performance, don't get these crippled processors, FPU performance will literally be half of the regular ones. I wonder why someone would want to do this when they're already trailing it's competitor, by far.

Also, consider AMD has had a long lineup of mobile processors for a while and now it becomes worse:

• Phenom II
• Turion II
• Turion II Ultra (not on "Champlain" but will overlap for some time)
• Athlon II
• AMD V Series
• AMD Sempron
• Athlon Neo

The AMD V series seems a more reasonable effort and one that makes re-branding of Radeon HD 4000 cards into 500v series cards at least have sense - it's a new low-end component series, all sharing the same brand. But the rest? I'm not your regular consumer and I get confused. Turion, Turion Ultra? Athlon? Athlon Neo? At least the Sempron is gone. 

Model numbers are enough thank you - especially if they are sensibly assigned (which, by the way, is not what Intel's been doing).

While AMD's platform does feature better graphics performance than Intel's current offerings, it has been loosing ground for more than a year now and is in dire need of Fusion processors(please see Fusion caught on video) to make up for the recent losses.